Neil Williman- How I qualified for the Freeride World Tour

Comment Share Posted on Wednesday May 18th at 9:32 p.m. Tweet

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Freeriding. Freeriding is skiing down gnarly places the best you can, and is also known as Big Mountain or Extreme Skiing. The best you can means the fastest and smoothest you can, and jumping off the biggest cliffs you can. If you can do tricks off these cliffs that's even better. There is a competition circut called the Freeride World Tour (FWT), on which the top 20 guys in the world compete, travelling from Central Europe to America, Russia and back. A lot of people want to be on the tour so there is a whole other competition circut to qualify for it, and that's where I come in.

This was my second year on the qualifying circut (the 'FWQ'), and I've competed in NZ, France, Switzerland, Slovakia, Austria and Norway. It's been an incredible experience, made all the more interesting by travelling to a lot of them with Pete Oswald and Sam Smoothy. The first year was a steep learning curve and I often went too hard and crashed, finishing 37th overall near Pete (41st), while Sam won his last competition before breaking his leg and finished 4th, qualifying himself for the FWT 2011. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mor7ZS0Oc1M to see how he went.

The competition season runs from the start of May till the end of April so the NZ competitions are some of the first. I got off to a good start in the 10-11 season with a 5th at NZOpen (a 3* event, the second most important type), but backed it up with hearty crashes at Chill Series (2*) and Ruapehu Extreme (3*).

For the Northern Winter I was based in Chamonix so the first 4* of the competition year (the highest level qualifying competition) was just down the road in La Clusaz. I went into it feeling good but skied too mellow in qualifiers and didn't make finals, finishing 36th. My confidence was dropping with only one good result from 4 comps. But Austria was the next stop and I got it back together, taking 6th in the 4* event there, the most points I had ever gained from one competition.

This moved me up to 8th in the overall qualifier rankings, within striking distance of the top 5- where I needed to be to qualify for the FWT. The buzz was dashed at the next stop in Switzerland though where my ski released on landing my 2nd last cliff, because I hadn't set my bindings right. With a bitter taste in my mouth and no one to blame but myself I headed back to Chamonix, where we were having the worst snow season in 23 years. The last competition of the year was in Norway and I was pleased to find I had only dropped to 10th after crashing in Switzerland. After some quick maths I figured out that a podium finish in Roldal, Norway would put me in the top 5 and qualify me for the FWT. I had taken 4th in Roldal the year before (my best result of that season), but this year it had been upgraded from a 3* to a 4*, drawing many more of the best freeriders from central Europe including some guys already on the world tour.

Everything came together for me that day though, I stuck all my cliffs including a backflip off the last one, and took 2nd. This put me in 5th overall and qualified me for the FWT 2012, and was one of the best parties of my life!

For video footage of Roldal check out Williman Webisode 6 on NZSkier.com or www.wix.com/neilwilliman/freeskier. There will be a season edit with all my best competition footage included coming out in a few weeks too. Stay tuned