Perisher
au

On the 22nd August, Perisher will again host one of the world’s most unique slopestyle events.  With a stacked field of the absolute who’s who of snowboarding and freeskiing and the best park in the southern hemisphere The Mile High will again be the highlight of the winter for freestyle fanatics.

Included in this year’s competitor line up are numerous global winter sports superstars. In Men’s snowboard the current field consists of 10 of the 12 finalists from the Sochi Olympics or 13 of the 16 from the 2015 US X-Games including Sage Kotsenburg (US). Women’s snowboard boasts Sochi Olympic gold medalists and 2015 X-Games Gold Medalists and the freeski also has both Olympic and X-Games gold medalists.

The event is unique for a number of reasons. No other event on either The World Snowboard Tour or The World Freeski Tour sits in a time window with no other events on at the same time in another part of the world so all competitors are in Australia. They come to train in the Perisher terrain park and compete in The Mile High and the combination of the two is the ideal build up to their huge Northern Hemisphere competition schedules. The Mile High is also the only ‘true jam’ format event on the World Snowboard Tour, which means that riders who qualify for finals get to ride as many runs as they can within the final session and are judged on every run. This really pushes the riders and the sports as it promotes style and variety of tricks and reduces the impact of athletes with a perfect single scoring run. The end result really reflects on who the best most consistent rider with a large focus placed on style. 

The Perisher Terrain Park is designed and constructed by Perisher’s international team of builders managed by Charles Beckinsale. “This year we will be trying to step it up in terms of more features within the competition area. The Mile High’s unique jam format final makes creativity more of a factor than in standard competitions. The rider with the largest variety of technical tricks, style, runs and consistency will win the event – not the rider with simply the highest scoring single run, which is the standard way of judging events these days. We will be designing the course so there are as many options as possible come the finals. I get a large amount of input from riders with Torstein Horgmo (NOR) being fundamental to rider input.”