Snowboarding
World’s longest rail: Round 2
Nitro team rider Basti Rittig smashes a snowboarding world record in style.
Basti Rittig… 10m down, 74m to go for the record
© Markus Rohrbacher @manusmarkus #nitrousa
The Godfather II, The Empire Strikes Back… some sequels are just so much better than the original. This is one of them.
A couple of months ago, we reported on the Nitro crew’s latest project: to not only break a 2011 world record for the longest rail slide on a snowboard (78.70m), but to do it on a significantly more difficult and legitimate rail setup.
Check out how they got on second time around in the player below.
2 min
World record: Longest rail slide
World record: Longest rail slide
The rail was definitely legit: over a metre high, a single round bar and 84m long. A rail so long, that besides the main problem of balance, the riders’ bases were literally melting, due to friction. It was a tough challenge: so tough that in part one, even Marc Swoboda’s crack crew of pro rail shredders found themselves beaten…
World record!
© Markus Rohrbacher @manusmarkus #nitrousa
Beaten, but not defeated. They swore to return, so in June 2015 the lorryload of cold steel was transported to the Dachstein Glacier in Austria for the rematch. And this time, Marc Swoboda, Dominik Wagner, Ana Rumiha, Žiga Rakovec, Benny Urban and Basti Rittig were ready:
The "award ceremony"
© Markus Rohrbacher @manusmarkus #nitrousa
Right from the start, it was on. The rail looked a little straighter this time round, the slope a little steeper, and the riders were clearly having fun riding the beast. In round one, the guys rode for three days straight before admitting defeat.
This time around, Nitro team rider Basti Rittig got the job done in just four hours. Basti, who had been looking confident from the start, locked into a perfectly balanced 50-50, rode that rail all the way to the end, and looked like he could have gone on for another 84m.
The #nitrousa Crew
© Markus Rohrbacher @manusmarkus #nitrousa
As a rule, snowboarders are not very interested in breaking records: having fun is way more important (and less quantifiable). But in this particular case, it’s good to see the Nitro crew combining the best of both worlds – a bunch of friends having fun, while raising the performance bar another notch higher.
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