During the New Year’s jumping session in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympic stadium ski jumpers are usually chasing the distance record. At Red Bull Gap Session, 18 of the world’s best snowboarders conquered the airspace.
Two years ago an over-dimensional, 20-metre kicker made Red Bull Gap Session the most notorious tests of courage on the snowboard scene. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, this year the snowboard pros constructed a 22-metre kicker out of 350 trucks’ worth of snow. With the aid of this ramp, boarders were able to cover a 15-metre gap in the greatest of style. The best boarders were rewarded in the categories ‘Best Overall Performance,’ ‘Best Trick’ and ‘Longest Airtime.’
Respect is relative
As was the case at Red Bull Gap Session 2006, the best trick of the evening was managed by co-initiator David Benedek. The German impressed the crowd and his adversaries with a Frontside Doublecork 1080. But the man of the hour was a 21-year-old Swede. Chris Sörman delivered the best overall performance and additionally garnered the ‘Longest Airtime’ with 2.81 seconds in the air. “When I first saw the kicker, I had great respect for it. Now everyone respects me,” said Sörman proudly after having successfully completed his long-distance flight on the 20-metre-long, 50-metre-wide, 70-metre-long landing hill.
0.3 seconds short of the record
Yet Sörman wasn’t able to break the airtime record of 3.1 seconds. In 2006, Christophe Schmidt secured his place in the record books at Red Bull Gap Session with airtime of 3.1 seconds. Noteworthy was that, back then, the German ‘only’ had a 20-metre long kicker at his disposal. Sörman regretted not being able to break the record: “You can only imagine how long 3.1 seconds in the air must feel. On this kicker everything was possible. Unfortunately we couldn’t use it in the battle to break the airtime record.”
Red Bull Gap Session