As the first full snow season after the Beijing Winter Olympics, this year's snow season is particularly lively. Echoing the enthusiasm of the people on ice and snow, the top competitions are also returning to China.
On November 30, the 2023-2024 FIS Snowboard and Freestyle Skiing Big Air World Cup kicked off at the Shougang Ski Big Air "Snow Flying Sky" in Beijing. Then, on December 6, the freestyle and snowboard halfpipe World Cup was restarted at Genting Snow Park in Chongli. The two World Cups have brought together almost the world's top players, and these masters have once again interpreted the unique charm of snowboarding with their own extreme performances.
"Play" is the most important thing
On December 2, the Big Air World Cup final was held in "Snow Flying". The crowd was almost full, with a significant number of spectators coming for Chinese snowboarder Su Yiming, who had a rare chance to make his home country appearance after the Winter Olympics.
At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Su Yiming, who was only 17 years old, won one silver and one gold in one week, breaking through the best results of Chinese athletes in snowboarding. In the final of the snowboard men's big air competition, Su Yiming had already locked up the championship through the first two jumps. Instead of choosing 1980 for the final jump, as some expected, he did a simple outward 360-degree spin.
After drawing an ethereal and slow arc, Su Yiming fell calmly. He later explained: "I just want to enjoy this last slip." ”
Su Yiming trains at the Beijing Shougang Big Air Ski "Snow Flying".
The between-path between Su Yiming and snowboarding is a two-way street. Since learning to ski Xi at the age of 4, in Su Yiming's heart, skiing is equated with "fun". Because he likes skiing, at the age of 6 or 7, Su Yiming skied more than 500 kilometers in a snow season. At the age of seven, he became involved with the snowboarding brand BURTON. Soon, his father's level and domestic environment could not keep up with his progress, and his parents chose to let him start training in places such as Japan and New Zealand, and gradually came into contact with world-class training resources.
After becoming a "world nomad", Su Yiming found that the charm of snowboarding is not limited to the competitive level: there is no life-and-death atmosphere in the snowboarding family, everyone is more focused on themselves, and the skaters are more concerned about the innovation of the movements. When someone makes a beautiful move, the "opponent" in the arena is sometimes even happier than himself.
Su Yiming also found that these skaters are so free and chic, and the gods of this circle believe that there is no standard answer to skating, the important thing is to skate your own style, and each skating is a personal show that shows itself. They believe that life is the same – that life doesn't have to make painful choices, but that it's about exhausting all possibilities. Therefore, their lives are also very rich in addition to skiing, going to school, surfing, playing music, they love skiing, and they love life itself.
Su Yiming gradually became a part of the world's veneer community, falling in love with hip-hop music and playing guitar like friends and idols, but more importantly, he embraced the spirit shared by the community. For him, whether it is skiing or life, "play" is the most important, which is also a sentence that Su Yiming and snowboarders often hang on their lips. In 2018, when Su Yiming trained in Japan with his mentor Yasuhiro Sato, he skied 300 to 320 days a year, and skied up to four snowboards a week. But after winning gold at the Beijing Winter Olympics, he said in an interview that "training is fun".
After the Winter Olympics, it was discovered that the snowboarding prodigy seemed to have disappeared from view for a while, not even competing in any official FIS events. Su Yiming's explanation for this is that after winning the coveted gold medal, he suddenly felt very "empty" in his heart and wanted to try something other than skiing. So he played fishing and surfing, participated in activities to promote skiing, and even started Xi high school classes, because during this time he was about to welcome a huge change - he became a freshman at Tsinghua University in 2023. Su Yiming doesn't feel that these attempts outside of skiing are a waste of time, he believes that they represent the possibilities of his life just as much as skiing - the most important part of the snowboarding spirit is the freedom to chase the possibilities. "There are a lot of things I want to try, and of course I may not be able to play the best, but I will try to do it as well as I can. ”
In this Big Air World Cup, it was found that "not doing his job" did not affect his form. In the final, he successfully made a reverse foot inward rotation of 1800 on the first jump, ranking first. In the second round, he successfully challenged the 1980 movement of the forefoot inward rotation and scored a game-high 95.50 points, sealing the championship ahead of schedule. After the game, Su Yiming revealed that he had previously tried the action of turning 1800 with his back foot in Austria and New Zealand, but he was unsuccessful. It wasn't until he returned to the Shougang Big Air that he successfully completed the move on the second day of open training, but he still took a little risk and put the 1800 in the first jump - Su Yiming is still "cool" enough.
Su Yiming won the 2023-2024 FIS Snowboard Big Air World Cup Championship
Winning or losing is not as important as love
Like Su Yiming, who talks about "playing", there is also Liu Jiayu, the runner-up in the women's snowboard halfpipe event and a BURTON contracted athlete.
If Su Yiming has been immersed in snowboarding culture since she was a child, then this representative of Chinese women's snowboarding is a halfway monk. In 2003, when snowboarding had just been established in China, the family sent 11-year-old Liu Jiayu to the Harbin team. Since then, Liu Jiayu, as one of China's first professional snowboarders, has begun a long and arduous training.
Liu Jiayu is not a talented athlete, and she often falls all over her body and is injured during training, but with a ruthless spirit, she has become a leader in women's snowboarding, and her motto is "No pains, no gains". But sometimes she asks herself when faced with mechanical, repetitive training, "Why do I want to snowboard? Do I like this thing or not? What is snowboarding?"
Because he practiced too hard, injuries have always been a problem that Liu Jiayu can't avoid. At the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Liu Jiayu was affected by injuries and only finished fourth. After the Games, she suffered a shoulder injury, and by the time of Sochi 2014, she underwent two major surgeries that ended her in ninth place.
After the defeat at the Sochi Winter Olympics, she had the idea of retiring in the face of a series of injuries and achievements that she could never break through. She began to put down her training, ran out with her skis and "played", taking skiing as a pure relaxation, thinking of retiring when she returned to China. But as she played, she figured it out and began to really capture the essence of snowboarding: "Skiing is a very happy thing, if you feel painful, there is no need to continue, during that time, after letting go of all the baggage, I found the joy of skiing again, I know that I want to continue because I love it." ”
In fact, Liu Jiayu has been a fun-loving child since she was a child, and has a natural love for sports. "Snowboarding is different from other [sports], it has its own culture, not just for the sport, not just for the championship, but to have fun. She used to say that.
Since then, whether it is winning the silver medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, making a breakthrough of "zero" medals for China in this event, or only finishing eighth at the Beijing Winter Olympics because of a mistake, Liu Jiayu seems quite light-hearted, because for Liu Jiayu, winning or losing is no longer the most important thing.
LIU'S EPIPHANY ABOUT THE SPIRIT OF SNOWBOARDING ALSO CONTRIBUTED TO HER HAND-IN-HAND WITH BURTON IN 2018, AS THEY SHARED THE SAME VALUES.
After the Beijing Winter Olympics, Liu Jiayu never participated in official FIS competitions, but traveled around the world to experience the world and find new directions. Liu Jiayu also often skis outdoors with some amateur friends, and this kind of aimless skiing makes her feel great fun.
In this halfpipe World Cup, Liu Jiayu revealed that she found a coach who could "call" with her not long ago, which gave her great inspiration, although she did not reach the goal of winning the Winter Olympics gold medal, but what she wanted to do was to continue to explore the fun of snowboarding with this coach, because as she said after winning the silver medal in this World Cup: "The biggest victory is not to challenge others, but to overcome yourself." ”
The intergenerational inheritance of the spirit of veneer
In the life stories of Su Yiming, Liu Jiayu and almost any snowboarder, the sport's powerful spiritual energy can be seen. In fact, the beginnings of this spirit can be traced back to Jake Burton, the father of snowboarding.
Jake was born in New York, USA in the 50s, and when he was a child, he was active and liked surfing and other sports. During his teenage years, a sliding toy called the Snurfer (a board made of wood with a rope in front of it to pull the direction was used to glide on the snow) among children in the United States. At the age of 14, Jake bought a piece of Snurfer with $10 he had saved, and it brought him great joy ever since.
After graduating from college, Jake got a decent job on Wall Street, but he didn't like the Wall Street vibe, and he wanted to do something he loved and could give him a sense of meaning. He remembered Snurfer, who he had been obsessed with, and he decided to improve it and turn it into a real sport. In 1977 he made a risky decision: he left Wall Street and founded his own brand, BURTON, which is widely regarded as a milestone in the development of snowboarding.
Soon after, Burton's first mass-produced snowboard, Burton Backhill, was born. But in the beginning, the promotion of snowboarding was difficult, and throughout the 1970s, major ski resorts did not even allow people to bring snowboards into the slopes. But Jake is so passionate about snowboarding that he has put all his energy, time and money into promoting the sport, improving the product and personally lobbying the resorts to embrace the sport. Things started to take a turn for the better, and from the 1980s onwards, snowboarding grew rapidly.
Like many of the Beat Generation, Jake has the confidence and impulse to change society, and snowboarding is his tool to drive social change, so the sport has been marked as independent and free from the beginning. Early players challenged traditional values with hippie spirit, punk music, and second-hand clothing, which made snowboarding a powerful sport, and the spirit of snowboarding has been passed down from generation to generation.
Jake Burton
As Jake's lifelong masterpiece, the BURTON brand has also become a distinctive symbol of snowboarding to some extent, participating in the shaping of the snowboarding spirit. Whether it's the slogan "WE RIDE TOGETHER" or "Have as much fun as possible", it echoes this spirit. On the other hand, "Rider First" has been BURTON's brand motto for many years. Over the years, BURTON has been serving skaters around the world in various ways, especially with the support and persistence of professional equipment, and has launched a number of epoch-making snowboard products.
In the 1980s, an epoch-making figure in the snowboarding world, Craig Kelly, decided to drop out of college to become a professional snowboarder, and he is widely regarded as the first true professional snowboarder. He joined BURTON when Craig was in the limelight. One of the things that motivated him to become a Burton rider was because he saw Burton's investment in product development and the continuous advancement of snowboarding technology. Craig's arrival was a milestone in the brand's product history, and he was deeply involved in the development of snowboards after joining BURTON. Jake once said of him: "When I started following Craig's advice, my company started to succeed and take off quickly, and when the rest of the industry followed Craig, the sport started to really flourish." ”
Although Craig has long since passed away, his professionalism has remained with BURTON. That's why Jake named the new prototype board R&D center BURTON Craig's Prototype Factory. Since then, the factory has become a symbol of the brand's professionalism and the significant investment that BURTON has invested in the research and development of snowboard products. Covering more than 1,000 square meters, Craig's prototype board R&D center has BURTON's highest-end, purpose-built manufacturing machines that can not only produce a brand new veneer in a matter of hours, but also use rapid prototyping machines to manufacture plastic retainer accessories overnight and then test them in the snow the next morning. The R&D center also houses a machine shop, which allows engineers to create and test special parts and production processes, which is critical for brands that want to grow veneer manufacturing processes around the world.
TODAY, ALMOST ALL OF BURTON'S CONTRACTED ATHLETES PRODUCE THEIR SNOWBOARDS HERE. THESE ELITE ATHLETES' SNOWBOARDS ARE HIGHLY CUSTOMISED, CRAFTED IN A PROTOTYPE FACTORY BY BURTON IN A FULLY CUSTOMISED MANNER AFTER FULLY LISTENING TO THE ATHLETES, TO ENSURE THAT THE ATHLETES PERFORM ON THE FIELD.
BURTON Craig's原型工厂。
BURTON HAS ALSO BROUGHT PROFESSIONALISM TO CHINA, AND HAS BEEN HELPING THE CHINESE SKIING INDUSTRY SINCE 2002. The brand is not only committed to popularizing snowboarding and interpreting the spirit of snowboarding through various activities, but also has been serving China's elite athletes with professional products. As early as 2005, BURTON began to provide a series of equipment from skis to snowshoes, bindings, snow goggles, helmets, snow suits and other equipment for the Chinese snowboard halfpipe national team. IN THE POST-OLYMPIC ERA, THIS PARTNERSHIP HAS CONTINUED – BURTON HELD A SIGNING CEREMONY WITH THE CHINESE SNOWBOARD NATIONAL TEAM IN MARCH THIS YEAR, AND BURTON WILL BE THE SPONSOR OF THE CHINESE SNOWBOARD TEAM FOR THE 2022-2026 OLYMPICS IN MILAN 2026.
In this FIS World Cup event, BURTON's support for Su Yiming and Liu Jiayu is part of this help. In fact, in the two World Cup events, BURTON will also support many athletes such as Anna Gasser, the women's big air champion in the big air World Cup, Ken Otsuka, a multi-time World Cup and X Games champion, Ayumu Hirano, a medalist in the Winter Olympics, and Mitsuki Ono, a rising star in the halfpipe. With the help of BURTON's professional equipment, these athletes have been able to break through at the World Cup and fully interpret the charm of snowboarding, and more importantly, as the driving force of snowboarding, the unique spirit of the athletes is deeply resonating with Chinese young people, and this resonance will undoubtedly attract more participants to snowboarding in China in the future.