The Freestyle Rundown - April 7, 2020

A big hello and how are ya to freestyle ski fans around the world during what is a time of some pretty extreme uncertanty, concern, and fear for everybody. With the FIS Freestyle World Cup season shutdown prematurely a few weeks ago and the chairlifts at ski resorts pretty much everywhere no longer spinning, most of us are longing hard for the days when we can be back on the hill and doing what we all love best.

While the resorts certainly won't be opening up again before the summer's fully here (at least not in the northern hemisphere), and while most of us are sliding into our third or fourth week of self-isolation, social distancing, and  it doesn't mean there isn't anything interesting happening in the world of skiing.

Beginning today we'll be taking a page from FIS Snowboard's Monday Mix and launching our own version called the Rundown to go online every Wednesday through the off-season. We'll be collecting the best/funniest/entertaining-est pieces of social media and news from around the web and bringing them all together here very week in what we hope can be a bit of a light in these dark times.

So without further ado, let's dive into what's been going down around town, starting with the endlessly entertaining Andri Ragettli who, after absolutely taking over the airwaves a couple weeks ago with his latest, self-isolation version of the parkour challenge (as well as offering Justin Bieber assistence for his next attempt), was back this week illustrating a couple of super hard ways to do easy things.

First up, hardway bike riding:

And next, hardway...networking?

Speaking of making things more difficult, Thibault Magnin (ESP) went ahead and found a way to take standing backflips from just "extremely very hard" to "literally impossible." First off, who can even do a one-legged squat that deep? Secondly, who can do a one-legged standing backflip to one-foot-landing, even WITHOUT the squat at the start? Thirdly...IS THIS ALL JUST SOME KIND OF JOKE TO YOU, THIB??

If Thib's out here setting new standards in the bionic quads department, Canada's Noah Bowman is looking to take his upper body on a hot trip to Gainsville with these Redbull bumper plates. Next week we want to see two flats per side, Noah...

And wrapping up what was a big week for meme-ing by the men of freeski, Bowman's compatriot Phil Langevin said "hey who even needs to go outside to ski anyway?" and then went ahead and turned himself into a ShredSauce character. Did you see that trip 16 ender tho?

On to some slightly more serious matters, as Monday, April 6th marked the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. An initiative with the goal of "implementing and ensuring the sustainability of field programs, maximizing the use of sport for development and peace and leading social transformation in every area of the world affected by poverty or social instability," Peace and Sport has done incredible work to "reinsert child soldiers back into society, to help war orphans rebuild their self-confidence, to reintegrate refugees, facilitate access to education, and more…" and on Monday athletes like ski cross legend Ophelie David (FRA) showed their support by showing their white cards on social media...

Sticking with ski cross for a minute, Australia's very own Sami Kennedy-Sim, along with SnowAust launched a new initiative of her own on Monday, dubbed #SnowActive. With eight 30-minute workouts coming to you every Tuesday from a two-time Olympic SX athlete over the next several weeks, keeping your body tuned up and ready for whenever this lockdown gets lifted should be a breeze.

Over in the moguls world, French ace Ben Cavet took a little look-back at our Behind the Scenes feature with him from a few weeks ago, where he reminisced on his decade-long World Cup career. Still just 26-years-old, Cavet has been arguably the second-best men's moguls skier in the world behind the incredible Mikael Kingsbury for much of the past 10 years...

Speaking of look-backs, we've been running a series that features some of the very best moments of the 2019/20 World Cup season on our social media channels over the past 10 days or so. From Laura Peel (AUS) and Noe Roth (SUI) taking the wins at the final competition of the season in Krasnoyarsk (RUS) to earn what was for each of them their first career crystal globes, to Johanne Killi and Birk Ruud of Norway sweeping the top of the podium at the Air + Style in Beijing (CHN) , to Sandra Naeslund's insane crash and comeback in Sunny Valley (RUS), there were some truly amazing #topmoments worthy of revisiting.

Meanwhile, the US Ski & Snowboard Team has some excellent in-depth season recaps up now. You can check out their Freeski season recap HERE, and expect their Freestyle recap coming up real soon.

And finally, to wrap things up for this week, let's enjoy a little actual skiing, beginning with Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympic Games halfpipe gold medal winner Andrew Longino (CAN) showing that he's no slouch in the park either with this dreamy clip...

Oh, one last thing - PREP YOUR SKIS BEFORE SUMMER STORAGE. You'll have to know some French to get the full tutorial from the inimitable Fanny Smith (SUI), but even if you don't parlé francais, you can still get the basic idea here...

Ok, that's it for now. Stay safe, stay sane, stay a couple metres away from everyone wherever possible, and we'll see ya here next week!