Who runs snowboarding?

THERE is no end to professional snowboard tours’ efforts to wrest control of their sport from the International Ski Federation (FIS). Consider the World Snowboarding Championships, which wrapped up in Oslo on February 19th. In an unabashed dig at what many riders see as overweening skiers, TTR, the most strident of the tours, trumpeted the event, to be held every four years, as “the first championships run by snowboarders since 1999”. FIS runs its own Snowboarding World Championships every two years; the last took place in 2011. Predictably, then, Sarah Lewis, FIS’s secretary general, remarked that there was no world championship on her organisation’s schedule last week.

And yet world champions were crowned. There were no surprises in the half-pipe competition, won by Kelly Clark and Iouri Podladtchikov. For Ms Clark, an American veteran of the discipline, it was the 15th straight win. In the absence of half-pipe’s undisputed king, Shaun White, Switzerland’s Mr Podladtchikov was also expected to do well. Americans and Canadians dominated the slopestyle competition, which involves riders performing a series of tricks, like jumps and slides, off assorted obstacles on a single run. Chas Guldemond, an American rider, snatched the title from Canada’s Sebastien Toutant at the last minute, with a remarkable final run. Canadians got their own back in the ladies contest, with their Spencer O’Brien easily beating Jamie Anderson from America. The winners each received a cheque for $40,000.

As we explained in detail in an earlier post, the tussle for the soul of the sport began in 1998, when to the dismay of many riders the International Olympic Committee (IOC) put FIS in charge of Olympic snowboarding. Most recently it came to a boil in 2011, after the IOC fast-tracked slopestyle’s introduction into the itinerary for the 2014 Games in the Russian resort of Sochi. FIS spurned the tours’ offer of a joint ranking system for the Olympic qualifiers, demanding instead that prospective Olympians compete in its own slopestyle events, which many professional riders avoid, regarding them as second-rate. Some, including Mr Guldemond, have been murmuring about a possible boycott of the Games, as Terje Haakonsen, a shoo-in for the first Olympic half-pipe gold, did in 1998.

TTR blew another raspberry at FIS on February 18th, when it announced the launch of the World Snowboarding Points Lists. This will incorporate results from all major events, including the TTR tour, X-Games, Dew Tour, as well as the FIS World Cup, to provide a world ranking for male and female athletes competing in half-pipe, slopestyle and big air (where, as the name suggests, riders are judged on one huge trick jump). TTR will use these combined rankings to qualify riders for its own top-tier events. It remains unclear whether the other tours will follow its example. FIS almost certainly won't.