Freerunning
No skis and no margin for error: Jason Paul runs the Streif
Freerunner Jason Paul turned the legendary Streif downhill course into a freerunning track. Snow, ice, helicopters and no room for mistakes. It looked incredible. He says he wouldn’t do it again.
Freerunning pro Jason Paul was watching last year’s Hahnenkammrennen when the idea hit him. As the world’s best downhill skiers hurled themselves down the Streif in Kitzbühel, he started wondering what it would feel like to take on the most notorious slope in alpine sport on foot – and turn it into a freerunning parcours.
He found out. Once. And that was enough.
“I would not do this again,” Paul says in the finished clip.
From ski race to freerunning line
Jason Paul feels the rush that only elite downhill skiers know well
© Joerg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool
The Streif isn’t just a ski course. It’s a place where mistakes are punished instantly. The Mausefalle. The Hausbergkante. The finish straight where careers are made or broken. Paul knew all of that going in – which was exactly the point.
Parkour is about finding lines through spaces most people don’t even consider usable. Watching the race from the stands, Paul saw the slope differently. Not as a downhill track, but as a sequence of take-offs, landings and transitions.
“I was standing at the Mausefalle and thought: this actually feels like a parkour spot,” he explains. “You look up to the start house, see the roof, and your head starts racing.”
Snow, ice – and no room for error
It took a year for the run to go from paper to piste
© Joerg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool
Turning that thought into reality took a year. Not to perfect the tricks, but to work out whether they were even possible.
Snow and ice are the opposite of what parkour athletes want. There’s no grip, no predictability, no forgiveness. Every jump behaves differently, every landing is a risk.
“The Streif doesn’t forgive mistakes,” Paul says. “That’s true for skiers – and it’s true for me.”
Much of the preparation happened nowhere near the mountains. Paul lives in Tokyo. No snow. No ice. Most of the work was mental: studying footage, calculating angles, rehearsing landings in his head.
“The only thing I could really practise was the helicopter move,” he says. “That was on a high bar in a gym.”
Starting the run… from the air
The run gets underway in James Bond style
© Little Shao/Red Bull Content Pool
Paul’s answer to the Streif’s brutal opening section was simple: don’t start on the ground.
With Flying Bulls pilot Mirko Flaim holding the helicopter steady, Paul hung from the skid, then dropped around four metres onto the Red Bull Energy Station. From there, he jumped again – onto the icy roof of the start house.
“It felt like an action film,” he says. “A proper once-in-a-lifetime moment.”
From there, the run began in earnest. Grandstands became obstacles. The steep pitch below the Mausefalle turned into a controlled slide. Every movement was precise. Every mistake would have been final.
The Hausbergkante gamble
Jason Paul backflips behind skier Sebi Mall
© Joerg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool
The most demanding moment came at the Hausbergkante – the jump that defines the Streif.
Paul added an extra complication. Instead of approaching it alone, he teamed up with skier Sebi Mall, riding as a passenger before launching into a tandem backflip over the edge.
Timing had to be exact. Balance had to be perfect. There was no second attempt.
“As soon as I took off, I knew it was right,” Paul says. “For a split second, everything was upside down. The sun was out. It was incredible.”
A finish line, parkour-style
Jason Paul crosses the finish line with flair
© Little Shao/Red Bull Content Pool
Paul finished where the downhill racers do – in the Kitzbühel finish area. But instead of fighting for 100ths of a second, he slowed things down, throwing clean flick-flacks into the snow.
It was a light-hearted ending to a project built on very real risk.
The Streif, Paul says, demanded respect. It gave him fear. And it delivered exactly the experience he imagined while watching from the stands a year earlier.
Incredible fun. Completely mad.
And, as he’s very clear about now: never again.