Grant Fielder on his way to victory in Leogang
Just as XC and enduro events now happen all year round, so the slopestyle/freeride crowd don't stop for the winter. They do things slightly differently, though. Rather than just plugging away through the slop and grime, the gravity set goes somewhere properly cold, builds jumps out of snow, sticks the studded tyres on and lets rip.
The weekend saw the second running of Kona White Style in Leogang, Austria. It's a slopestyle competition run on a course that combines wooden and snow-based constructions. The 200m-long course featured a drop, an 8m step-down gap, a step-up-step-down-northshore and a final step-up gap. The final gap proved the most challenging, and pulling something impressive over it looked like being the route to victory.
1,300 riders watched 20 riders from five countries fighting it out for €3,000 in prize money. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the riders didn't seem at all fazed by swapping dirt for snow - all the usual tricks were pulled out of the collective bag without hesitation.
12 riders made it to the flodlit final after Saturday's qualifying runs. Andreu Lacondeguy looked like the rider to beat, with a no-handed backflip over the final drop. But with a suicide over the first gap, a tailwhip off the step down and a superman Indian air in his second run, British rider Grant Fielder scored first place. Fellow Brit Chris Smith was third, with Lacondeguy between them in second.
