Slopestyle saddled up for Sunday at the Calgary Snow Rodeo
Feb 12, 2023·Snowboard Park & Pipe
The penultimate competition of the 2022/23 FIS Snowboard Park & Pipe World Cup season will go down this week in Canada, as we return to the Calgary Snow Rodeo for the third slopestyle World Cup of the 2023/ season and the last event on the calendar before we head over to Georgia for the Bakuriani 2023 FIS Freestyle, Snowboard and Freeski World Championships.
Men’s qualifications in Calgary are slated to take place on Friday, 10 February beginning at 10:00, followed on Saturday by women’s qualies and men’s semifinals, before slopestyle finals close out this season’s Snow Rodeo on Sunday, starting at 10:00. However, with some potentially disruptive winds in the forecast for Friday that schedule could be subject to change.
Slopestyle at the Calgary Snow Rodeo will be the fourth of five World Cup competitions in this season’s Shred the North series of Canadian events, as Canada looks to become the only nation in World Cup history to host five of the six main FIS Snowboard World Cup events in one season.
The Charles Beckinsale-designed and built slopestyle course at Calgary’s Winsport Canada Olympic Park is truly one of a kind, with three unique, multifaceted rail sections in the first half of the course, followed by two big kickers, and then another jib section with launch rail and butterbox to down-rail options to finish things off.
MARINO LOOKING TO TAKE NEXT STEO TOWARDS POTENTIAL GLOBE
With seven of the top-10 riders on the women’s slopestyle World Cup rankings electing to take this week off, we can expect to see some movement on the standings once Sunday’s results are in the books here in Calgary. While we’ll miss some of the bigger names on the women’s side, this weekend could set us up for an especially exciting conclusion to the World Cup campaign at the slopestyle season finale in Silvaplana in March.
Top-ranked in the women’s Calgary field is the USA’s Julia Marino, who comes into the Snow Rodeo sitting in second place on the slopestyle standings, fresh off a win on home soil in Mammoth Mountain last weekend.
The win in Mammoth was Marino’s first World Cup podium in just over three years and that, along with her slopestyle silver medal win last winter at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, has put the 25-year-old once again in the conversation about the best women’s slope riders in the world. With a limited field on hand here in Calgary, the likelihood of Marino once again landing in the top-3 and moving herself ahead of current World Cup leader Reira Iwabuchi (JPN) is very good, indeed.
Also highly likely to find herself in the top-3 come Sunday is Canada’s own Laurie Blouin, Snow Rodeo winner in 2020 and third-place finisher last season. While Blouin finished a disappointing 13th place in Laax at her one other slopestyle World Cup start this season, she’s inarguably Canada’s finest slope rider, and gives the host nation one of their best hopes of a home podium this week.
Also a strong hope for the Canadian team is Jasmine Baird, who’s returning to competition after sitting out the last few weeks with a minor injury. While Baird may not be riding at 100% here in Calgary, even a less-than-full effort from the 23-year-old is usually pretty strong.
Also to keep an eye on for the women are Melissa Peperkamp from the Netherlands, who currently sits in ninth on the slopestyle rankings and sixth on the Park & Pipe overall standings, and Miyabi Onitsuka, who has three top-5 finishes this season, including third place at the Copper Mountain big air World Cup.
DOMINANT DUSTY ON A ROLL HEADING INTO THE RODEO
For the men the Calgary Snow Rodeo slopestyle startlist is full of heavy hitters, with the USA’s Dusty Henricksen leading the way.
If one were to custom-engineer an iconic snowboarder in a lab, that rider might come out looking like Henricksen. The recently-turned-20-year-old boasts a combination of an incomparable style and an outrageously deep - and ever-evolving - bag of tricks that is simply unmatched in the world right now.
With a runner-up finish at the Laax Open a few weeks ago and the win last weekend at his home resort event in Mammoth Henricksen continues to prove that not only is he the people’s champ, he’s a competition beast who can put it all together when it matters, week in and week out.
With 180 points Henricksen has a strong lead over current slopestyle World Cup second place Valentino Guseli of Australia, who’s 55 points back with 125.
Perhaps the most talked-about snowboarder in the world right now, Guseli this season has established himself as what might be referred to as a “generational talent,” and a true force in all three of the main snowboard competition venues - big air, halfpipe and slopestyle.
Already the winner of this season’s big air crystal globe and currently in third place on the halfpipe World Cup standings with one competition to go (here in Calgary on Friday night at 19:00 MST), Guseli is putting together the type of season that we haven’t seen since the absolute peak of Shaun White’s career.
Last weekend Guseli carved his name into the record books, becoming the first snowboarder in history to earn a World Cup podium in all three of the FIS Snowboard Park & Pipe events in one season when he finished second in both the halfpipe and slopestyle competitions at Mammoth Mountain.
To follow that up, on Thursday Guseli put down the top score in halfpipe qualifications here in Calgary, and with his training runs on the slopestyle course looking as good as anyone in the field’s, we could be in for unprecedented repeat double-podium performance this weekend.
On the outside looking in on this season’s crystal globe battle (at least for right now) but still very much in the podium conversation for this weekend, are a whole stack of rippers.
For the North Americans, we’ll see Sean Fitsimons, Jake Canter, Brock Crouch and Chris Corning backing up Henricksen for the super strong US team, while the host Canadians will have Darcy Sharpe leading a cast of young bucks that includes Liam Brearley, Cameron Spaulding and Nic Laframboise.
Tiarn Collins and Lyon Farrell of New Zealand, Taiga Hasegawa and Kaito Hamada from Japan, Kalle Jarvilehto of Finland and William Mathisen of Sweden…there’s a whole of firepower here in Calgary, and we can’t wait to see how things play out here in the coming days.
WHERE TO WATCH
