Slopestyle season kicking off in Secret Garden
Dec 19, 2018·Snowboard Park & Pipe
Secret Garden (CHN) - The 2018/19 FIS Snowboard slopestyle World Cup season will be opening this week in significant fashion, as a strong international field of riders has gathered in Secret Garden (CHN) for their first taste of action at the venue that will serve as the playing field for the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games in just over three years’ time.
Qualifications at Secret Garden will begin with the ladies on Thursday, December 20 at 9:05 local time, followed by the first heat of men at 11:20. Finals are slated to go down on Friday, December 21, beginning at 13:00.
After the christening of Secret Garden with a successful World Cup halfpipe competition last season - the sequel to which is also going down at this week - slopestyle competition was added to the programme for the first time this year, meaning that the athletes on hand in China are the first to square off in top-tier competition at the future Olympic venue.
And what a venue it’s shaping up to be, as the Schneestern-constructed course boasts a myriad of lines and impressive, inventive features befitting of a slopestyle stop as important as it is. With a slew of rail and jump options through the top half of the course that includes a unique Great Wall-inspired canon-rail feature, the course then finishes off with three massive jumps, including a multifaceted second kicker with a roll-over design on the main booter, and side-hit options.
In the ladies’ competition a familiar story is likely to play out in Secret Garden with the ever-strong Japanese team looking to dictate the terms, as their one-two punch of Miyabi Onitsuka and Reira Iwabuchi will be tough to match for anyone else in the field.
Iwabuchi and Onitsuka went first and second at the season-opening Cardrona (NZL) big air World Cup back in September, before then repeating that result at the second big air event of the season in Modena. Impressively, both athletes bested Anna Gasser (AUT) there in Modena, who is widely regarded as the best female snowboarder in the world. While Iwabuchi fell to sixth at the most recent big air World Cup at the Air + Style in Beijing, Onitsuka picked up her third-straight runner-up result, and now both athletes sit tied atop the big air World Cup leaderboard.
While the two Japanese riders obviously excel on the jumps, both Iwabuchi and Onitsuka are just as at home on the rails, with each of them boasting slopestyle World Cup podiums from the past two seasons.
However, giving the Japanese duo a run for their money will likely be Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (NZL), as the 17-year-old Kiwi phenom looks to add to a resume that already includes PyeongChang 2018 Olympic bronze and Sierra Nevada 2017 world championships silver in big air, and a World Cup victory at the Spindleruv Mlyn slopestyle competition in 2016/17.
Otsuka emerging as one of world’s best ahead of Secret Garden
Things over on the men’s side get a little more complicated, with an intriguing mix of riders from Scandinavia to the USA, and from Japan to the Netherlands, all on deck and ready to explore the options the Secret Garden course presents.
Expectations are high for 17-year-old Takeru Otsuka of Japan, who comes into competition in China as one of the emerging stars of the snowboard world after winning X Games Norway big air gold last season. Otsuka started the 2018/19 season off by winning junior world championships gold in big air and slopestyle, before going on to earn a win and two runner-up results in three big air competitions this season, as well as earning the top jibbing score in last week’s Dew Tour team competition. An absolute beast in the air and on the rails, Otsuka is proving himself to be one of the best in the world in just his first full season of international competition.
There are, however, a host of strong riders on hand on Secret Garden that will push Otsuka to show his best stuff, including his teammates Hiroake Kunitake and Yuri Okubo, Sweden’s Mans Hedberg and Niklas Mattsson, a couple of experienced US riders in Lyon Farrell and Ryan Strassel, and New Zealand’s Carlos Garcia Knight - every one of whom has at least one podium on the World Cup circuit.
Add it all up and Secret Garden’s debut on the FIS Snowboard slopestyle World Cup tour promises to be an exciting and illuminating one, as some of the world’s best snowboarders show what’s possible on one of the most anticipated new venues in the world.
WATCH LIVE
BTV China
Eurosport Player
Eurosport Asia/Pacific
NBC Olympic Channel and NBC Sports Gold
QUICK LINKS
Secret Garden data page (programme, start lists, live scoring, results)
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