The Rundown - July 24, 2021
Jul 24, 2021·Ski CrossHappy Saturday and welcome to this week's edition of the Rundown where, as always, we'll be looking back at some of the best, brightest and bizarre-est of the past week in the online world of freestyle and freeski.
Seeing as how today also happens to be the first day of medal competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, we felt like taking a look back at one of our favourite moments from the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, when the USA's David Wise went fully ballistic on his final run at Bokwang Phoenix Park to defend his gold medal title...
Chills, every time.
Now before we get going with regularly scheduled Rundown programming, we want to take a minute to do a little advertising, as this week we announced a brand-new World Cup stop to open the 2021/22 season, as the Big Air Chur World Cup and music festival has been confirmed for October 22.
This will be the first-ever FIS Freeski World Cup competition in Switzerland, which is pretty crazy when you think about all the firepower the Swiss Freeski Team has boasted over the past...well, pretty much forever. We are hyped about this one.
We're still waiting on a logo and some graphics to go along with the event, so instead we'll just flash back to Andri Ragettli and Fabian Boesch dropping the gnarliest high-five of all time...
Alright, on to this week's goodness, starting with Birk Ruud, who doesn't need skis or snow if he wants to go jibbing in the summer. Having a diving platform and a cool body of water does help, though...
If you do happen to have skis and/or snow we're certainly not gonna hate on that, though, which means we'll give a little more love to the US team, who was still on site in Mt. Hood last week. Here's Cody Laplante, smooth as butter...
And here's Willie Borm, with a couple guy-in-the-sky photos that are actually pretty alright, and a real nice left 14...
And finally Colby Stevenson, with three completely mental 900s. "How can 900s be mental in 2021," you ask? Just click Play and see, thankyouverymuch...
Actually, while we're on the topic of smaller rotations, now's probably a good time to recognise that 7/20 day went down on Tuesday. As we have come to expect, a fine selection of lovely seven hundred and twenty degree spins were shared by variety of exceptional skiers, including Rell Harwood with the nosebutter option...
Kyle Smaine with the Chad's Gap option...
And ABM with the hypertweak option...
Something you may not have known you need in your life is summertime synchro backie doubles from Morgan Schild and Jaelin Kauf. But you do, you do need it in your life...
This has been a kind of US-heavy rundown so far but it's hard to stop when you've got stuff like Ashley Caldwell's massive full-full-full coming down the IG wire...
Before we fully jump across the pond we're going to straddle the pond, as we look to a Spanish skier with a little feature in a US newspaper: Thib Magnin x New York Times, read all about it HERE...
Ok, fully across the ocean we go, where it looks like Sacha Theocharis has a pretty solid work/life balance sorted out in Tignes...
Meanwhile, in the UK, three of the Isles' finest have been busy, beginning with Kirsty Muir and some dryslope action in Aberdeen...
Meanwhile, Tyler Harding introduced us to a new term this week when he went full "First-try Friday" at the indoor set-up. Tyler goes "First-try Friday" on this run while the rest of us are having a hard time even getting out of bed on the first try...
And finally we check in on Katie Summerhayes. Some say she's still stuck in those B-nets to this very day...
Let's check in on out ski cross brethren, even though there doesn't seem to be a lot of on-snow action going down on that side of things at the moment. However, the Swiss squad did post this beauty of a throwback to Jonas Lenherr and Fanny Smith winning the first-ever SX mixed team competition in Bakuriani last season...
Meanwhile, Brady Leman was throwing it back to his gold medal-winning performance at PyeongChang 2018, as he looks forward to watching the action going down at Tokyo 2020...
Is there fresh SX content on the horizon, though? Alex Marro seems to be telling "Yes"...
Ok, that's it for this week! Thanks for following along. Don't mind us, we'll just send ourselves out Finn Bilous style...