Thredbo Freerdie Series – Big Air, Tuesday July 20
Event | Photos by Ben Hansen words Reggae
Thredbo’s Freeride series continued this week with the Big Sir, the second comp of the five event series, held in perfect conditions at the High Noon terrain park on Tuesday and carrying $9900 in cash and prizes.
The Thredbo terrain park crew rebuilt the jumps on Monday, working into the night to create a 35-footer at the top while the second was a clean 40 feet. The wind was light and the crew threw down under the blue skies, with only a couple of gnarly falls, including women’s series leader Wiki Jones who cracked her helmet after landing on the knuckle on her first jump.
The hard landing didn’t deter the riders from attempting and stomping some big technical tricks and while the open men’s board and ski were the obvious standouts, the juniors also showed there is a lot of talent and depth on the Australian snow scene.
Each rider had three jumps, the best two counting towards the overall results. The start list was a who’s who of Australian skiing and snowboarding and the cream rose to the top pretty quickly with Ryan Tiene and Jye Kearney looking the goods in the snowboard men’s while Charlie Timmins and Jordan Houghton led the way on skis. One notable name missing was skier Boen Ferguson who blew his knee last week and was in Sydney undergoing surgery at the time his best mates were in the comp.
It was close in both divisions with Jye getting the nod over Ryan by a mere 0.1 with Andy Lloyd third. Jordan pipped Charlie by 0.9 with Johhny Lipzker third. However one of the most memorable jumps was open snowboarder Pete Long’s. He was being followed by a filmer who unfortunately went the wrong side of the first jump and rode under Pete who landed right on the guy’s head. Fortunately the only injury was to the camera and the film guy’s ego.
In the women’s snowboard Jessica Rich raised the bar with her first jump and was pushed by regular podium finishers Saph Farrell and Laura Williams. Billy Hayman won the grom snowboard with Ben Alexis second and Jesse Kennedy in third place. Sam Tomasi took out the the junior ski ahead of Ryan Cooke and Harrison McGuiness third. The junior women’s board was impressive with Alexandra Fitch just edging out Pride Hasler.
Georgia Kerr was the only female skier to enter and charged as hard as ever, landing a couple of huge back threes. Watkin McLennan brought up a big contingent of riders from Mount Buller – maybe next time he needs to bring up a few of the Buller girls to give Georgia a bit of competition because at the moment she is the only one flying the female freeskiing flag in New South Wales.
The next event in the Thredbo Freeride series is the ridercross, scheduled for Tuesday August 3.
For full results and overall standing in the Freeride Series go to : www.thredbo.com.au/freeride
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