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People have been getting high in Civic Center Park for a long time, but come January, some will be doing it in a much more spectacular—and legal—way. The park will host the LG FIS World Cup Snowboard Big Air event January 25 and 26, featuring some of skiing and snowboarding’s best riders hurling themselves down one of the largest man-made ramps ever constructed, reports The Denver Post. The ramp is slated to be more than 100 feet tall, 300 feet long, and 80 feet wide, roughly equivalent to the height of a 10-story building and the length of a football field.
The Denver date marks the first-ever U.S. stop for this particular big-air event, a prestigious affair in the snowboarding world that usually lands in places like Moscow, Barcelona, Quebec, Seoul, and London (video from last November in Barcelona below).
The timing puts the competition squarely in the middle of other high-profile winter sports events in Colorado: ESPN’s Winter X Games kicks off January 27, and the Snow Show, the SnowSports Industries of America annual exhibition, also starts January 27. The timing should help draw 20,000 spectators to downtown Denver, say organizers, and is part of a larger push to help boost the local economy and the state’s profile.
The LG FIS World Cup comes to Denver courtesy of Denver Sports, formerly known as the Metro Denver Sports Commission. An added bonus: Sprint will use the event to promote its upcoming rollout of 4G service in Denver, which is already available in some pockets of downtown, but not throughout the city.