Olympic gold medalists Shaun White and Hannah Teter headline a list of the world’s best snowboarders and freeskiers as NBC Sports presents live coverage of the Toyota Championship from Northstar-at-Tahoe, in Truckee, Calif, the third and final stop on the Alli Winter Dew Tour.  The Winter Dew Cup and a $1.5 million purse, the largest in action sports history, are on the line as the world’s best winter action sports athletes compete for their sport’s only regular season crown. NBC Sports’ live coverage of Freestyle Skiing Slopestyle airs Saturday, 2:30 – 4 p.m. ET, and Snowboard Superpipe featuring White and Teter airs 3-6 p.m. ET on Sunday. USA Network will air late-night coverage of Snowboard Slopestyle Friday at 2 a.m. ET/PT and Freestyle Skiing Superpipe Saturday, at 1 a.m. ET/PT.
NBC’s Pat Parnell (play-by-play), Todd Richards (analyst), Luke Van Valin (freeskiing analyst), Tina Dixon and Tiffany Simons (reporters) call the action from Northstar-at-Tahoe…. More info
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Outdoor enthusiasts like Josh Manchester, Phillip M. Journey and Bucko Slabaugh don’t need to buy ski passes to have fun. Just give them a windy day, some snow, and they’re high as kites.
Not literally, though. That would be dangerous and call for swift action.
But the three do love kite skiing and sometimes do it at Montana State University. Manchester, of Great Falls, is a recent MSU graduate in microbiology. Journey, from Florida, is an MSU sophomore in construction engineering technology. Slabaugh, from Bozeman, is a first-year architecture student at MSU…Â More info
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FREESKIING has been credited with making skiing cool again — particularly among the junior set, which had been lured by the snowboard’s renegade appeal. Thanks to twin-tip skis, which are rounded and upturned on both ends, freeskiers can land on the snow facing forward or backward, making it possible to do the flashy jumps and daring tricks of the snowboard on ungroomed backcountry snow, as well as on the pipes and jumps of terrain parks.
Overall sales of skis are in decline but freeskis are “a very hot category right now,†said Kelly Davis, research director for the trade group SnowSports Industries America … More info
One of the great things about the snow sports industry is that it keeps re-inventing itself every few years. Just when you think you’ve mastered everything there is in skiing, snowboarding, and backcountry skiing, somebody comes out with something new – like the dual edged snowboard.
Snowboarding was born during the 1960s and has gone through a number of evolutionary changes. Beginning with the “Snurf,” snowboarding started out as a simple toy without bindings or sophisticated technology. Jake Burton exploded onto the scene when he introduced his own unique snowboard design that included fixed bindings, space-age materials, and radical sidecut designs in the 1970s. Since then, snowboarding has enjoyed phenomenal success. But during the past five years, snowboarding interest has begun to wane as new winter sports enthusiasts return to the action of skiing made popular by the X-Games.
Many snowboarders have returned to skiing for one simple reason: skis allow the rider to take advantage of more varied terrain and ride them with more control. For riders who are still …Â More info
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