One of the funnest events in the snowboarding calender is underway down under – The Burton High Fives is at Cardrona, NZ for the second time.
The High Fives format also challenges riders to such activities as off-road Mini relay races, knife throwing and dune buggying
If you’ve not heard of the High Fives format before, it’s a team based contest that not only pits riders’ slopestyle and halfpipe skills against each other but also challenges them to such activities as off-road Mini relay races, knife throwing and dune buggying.
But the main events are of course the best: the slopestyle and halfpipe contests work on a jam format where each rider is allowed as many runs as they want or can manage within a certain time frame, allowing them to put down better and better runs each time and hopefully pushing progression.
At the inaugural event in 2012, Mark McMorris attempted the first ever triple cork in a slopestyle run, now almost a common place trick, but this shows the calibre of the contest: this should show what temperature the competition battlefield is running at post-Sochi.
Even though it’s held literally on the other side of the world, Burton have made it easier than ever to catch the event in (almost) real time: us Euros can catch a delayed feed of the contest starting at 9am UK time over on the official site.
Make sure you accidentally ‘sleep in’ or get that second screen running at work, you know this isn’t one to miss. With riders like Mark McMorris, Stale Sandbech, Billy Morgan, Torstein Horgmo, Taku Hiraoka, Ayumu Hirano, Seamus O’Connor, Jamie Anderson, Silje Norendal, Jenny Jones, Christy Prior, Chloe Kim, Torah Bright and Kaitlyn Farrington taking part it’s gonna be banger!