Tomorrow sees the relaunch of The Arctic Challenge contest in Oslo, Norway. The legendary event, co-created by Terje Haakonsen, will be celebrating its fifteenth birthday by taking things right back to basics.

Terje outlined his plans for the event back in January – well, sort of. With the whole point being to get away from homogenised, cookie-cutter pipe comps, he didn’t really have a fixed idea of exactly what would be going down. In fact, he still doesn’t; the format of the contest, to be held this Saturday 15th March, will be determined by the riders themselves. They’ve got tomorrow and Friday to practice the pipe, bounce some ideas around and reach some kind of consensus before putting it into action at the weekend.

Among the riders confirmed to attend are current Olympic champion Iouri Podlatchikov and X Games winner Danny Davis. The full list is as follows:

Iouri Podladtchikov, Markus Keller, Arthur Longo, Danny Davis, Jack Mitrani, Benji Farrow, Scotty Lago, Gabe Ferguson, Ben Ferguson and Terje Haakonsen.

Obviously none of the above would be in Norway if they weren’t interested in trying something a bit different, so we’re looking forward to seeing what kind of ideas they come up with.

As it stands, there’s no live stream of the event. The organisers have instead opted to make a documentary covering the whole process from soup to nuts, one that will probably not be a million miles away from Blank Paper Studio’s 2006 movie The Gap Session. Could the new-look TAC do for halfpipe what David Benedek’s famous comp did for big air?