Stylewars 2008

Last year was the first time I'd made it to Rich Heggarty's Stylewars event at Falls Creek, and let me tell you, it set quite the benchmark. Torstein Horgmo's flawless wizardry over the 120+ foot jump well and truly put Stylewars on the rest of the world's radar. With this in mind, I was wondering what Rich would whip out this year for the now 4 star TTR event.

I thought I'd missed out on a spot this year and was sitting around moping when I got the call from the boss himself. "You've got a spot, get up here!' was the call. "Cool, see you in the morning," was my reply. "Why wait til morning?" Well you can't argue with the boss, so I did the lightning pack, praying I'd gotten the essentials, dodged ice and hog-sized wombats and got into the resort sometime after 1am.

The first day gave us the same weather as last year, and it got everyone up to the comp site pretty keen. Blue skies and a slight tailwind blowing over a 90 foot step-down booter followed up by an 80 foot channel gap had the crew frothing. After a few mellow straight airs to get things started, it wasn't long before the crew started feeling out a few spins. The tailwind pushed a lot of people way down the landing, and only the strongest crew held out from getting squashed into the landing from way up there.

Torstein had a few free days on his hands again so showed up, tossed down his switch backside 1260 amongst a bag of other smooth-as tricks to take out the best trick of the event. As always it was a total pleasure to see this kid slay everything with killer smoothness. Oh shit, I'm turning into a Torstein groupie.

Not that it was only the Torstein show, crew from all over the world rolled into town to get their steez on and had a good time under the sun. It's definitely an event different to most, and was again well worth being there, good times all week. Next stop, Stylewars NZ at the Snowpark. Come on liver, back to work.