Inaugural Snow League World Challenge introduces a 720 cap to major contests

The inaugural Snow League World Challenge brought four-person teams together for a new competition format, with each team made up of two skiers and two snowboarders—one man and one woman in each discipline. Rather than simply competing for themselves, athletes were collecting points for their team across the event.

The Team Challengers, made up of Finley Melville Ives, Mischa Thomas, Sara Shimizu and Ryusei Yamada, came out on top at Cardrona, with the competition ultimately cut short by incoming weather.

Rotation Cap

The semifinals introduced a 720-degree rotation cap. That meant skiers had to keep their tricks to two full rotations or less, putting the emphasis on style, creativity, grabs, butters, drifts and, apparently, decks.

Fin Melville Ives took the men’s freeski division ahead of Team North America’s Hunter Hess, with a run featuring a crowd-pleasing tokyo drift flair. Back in competition for the first time since the Olympics, Fin leaned into the format, throwing tricks he wouldn’t normally use in a competition.

“I’ve never really done butters or drifts. I thought it was really sick to show a new avenue to what competing is and show them it’s not always about the biggest spins.”

Mischa Thomas also won the women’s freeski division, putting down a progressive switch alley-oop flat 540 and a stylish carve back to alley-oop 360.

The athletes clearly embraced the opportunity to do something different rather than simply trying to cram the biggest possible rotation into a run.

And that’s the most interesting thing about the whole event. A 720 cap sounds restrictive on paper, but it actually takes away the arms race and trick-flation allowing riders to express their creativity and put down runs packed with style.

With the weather closing things down before the finals, the semifinal results were used to determine the final standings, giving Team Challengers the overall victory.

It’s a slightly different approach to competitive freeskiing—and one that puts creativity and style back at the centre of the scoring rather than simply asking who can spin the most.

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