The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
For the second straight weekend, Colorado played host to a world-class, winter sports event, this time in the form of the Winter Dew Tour. The four-day event in Breckenridge showcased some of the world’s best snowboarders and skiers doing things most of us can barely conceptualize.
The men’s snowboard slopestyle event—a contest of tricks using huge jumps and rails—featured some of the sport’s most progressive riding and was won by 16-year-old Tyler Flanagan. He tells The Denver Post he was hoping to earn a top 10 finish in the first of three Dew Tour stops but now has his sights set on the tour’s overall championship, called the Dew Cup.
Jamie Anderson, a 19-year-old from South Lake Tahoe won the women’s slopestyle event with a 92.00, the highest score ever for a woman in this Dew Tour category. Up the hill from the slopestyle event was the superpipe competition, a signal of where the sport is going and what it will take to make the Olympic team.
Although the event featured an 18-foot halfpipe instead of the Olympic standard 22-foot halfpipe, some of the sport’s best came and laid it all out on the line.
Michigan’s Danny Davis says the four-foot shorter pipe was harder to adjust to, but that didn’t prevent him from blowing the competition away with two cab 1080 double corks (via the Summit Daily News). The trick is the new high bar for men’s halfpipe riding and happens when the rider performs two off-axis flips while spinning. Davis’ 96.5 score on his first run is the highest score in Dew Tour history.
Iouri Podlachikov earned the second spot, followed by 2002 Olympic bronze medalist J.J. Thomas of Golden. Breckenridge’s Steve Fisher and Zack Black, who took third last weekend at the Snowboarding Grand Prix, earned fourth and fifth, respectively.