First Freeride World Tour stop - Revelstoke

Comment Share Posted on Wednesday January 18th at 2:41 p.m. Tweet

NZ turns up in force for the Freeride/Freeski World Tour Stop in Revelstoke, Canada; Neil Williman, Sam Smoothy, CJ Wright, Janina Kuzma and Si Reeves.

And so, after Sweden, a week in Revelstoke, Canada. A sweaty plane trip from Umeå to Kelowna and my old buddy Jethro picks me up in our friend Si Reeves' car, who has been in Revelstoke long enough that Canadians call him a local. My body is complaining that it has only just got used to the European time zone and now I've dragged it back another 9 hours, almost the opposite side of the world again. But I can't complain; I'm almost in Revelstoke the place of legendarily large snow falls with a great crew of friends and a flash hotel provided by the Freeride World Tour! Still the stoke isn't quite enough to keep me awake for the 3 hour drive there from the airport and I doze off in the passenger seat just after an audacious offer to Jethro that I could drive a part of the part of this atrociously lighten road. They're not big fans of road reflectors in Canada, the only shiny thing I've seen since we left the airport was a sign to advise motorists of moose.

All the photos in this blog are slideshows (except this one), click on them to cycle through.

BOOM! I jerk awake and start yelling; ‘Moose, moose, we hit a goddam moose!, the windscreen has cracks all through it, it looks like it's barely holding on, and the blood/moose bits have obscured our vision for all except the lowest section of windscreen. Jethro hits the brakes pretty hard and I'm scared we're going to skid into oncoming traffic, but he brings it to a breathless stop on the side of the road as safely as you can with that much red stuff covering your vision. But then I look closer and the red stuff isn't blood, it's the bonnet. The red bonnet has come open and hit the windscreen. Fail. Sorry Si.

I share my hotel room with my old buddy Sam Smoothy, and we choose the same line for day 1 of the competition too. I land in a bomb hole and fall off the next cliff of the planned double drop. That fact that it was probably the forerunners bomb hole irks me somewhat, but then Sam proves it was still do-able by sticking it after me... I should've just gone faster. Heartbreakingly though he crashes in the runout and we're both out of the competition. It doesn't help us feel any better that Kye Petersen skis the same line, sticks it and sits first after day 1. Watching finals instead of skiing in them is always a bummer but it was a great show, with kiwi CJ Wright sending a double and taking the bottom air 30m/100ft plus! But crashing :( Check out the highlights vid on www.freerideworldtour.com. Kye Petersen (aka ‘the All I Can guy') won overall but there wasn't a lot of success for the kiwis here, Si Reeves held back by an injury and not making it through the qualifying day, with Janina Kuzma unlucky not to qualify for the finals either.

We make the most of the days we have remaining to us to explore Revelstoke, with the help of kiwis Mickey Ross, CJ Wright and Nat Von Loy. Unfortunately Si Reeves hurt his shoulder in his fall on qualifying day so he couldn't come and show us how to play in his home terrain. Thanks so much to him and the kiwi crew for hooking us up though- couch space when needed, photos (Mickey Ross), gnarly spots (CJ Wright) and most of all a warm welcome. Everyone is Revelstoke is super friendly too, even helping me get the 4:30am bus to the airport at a time when I needed help because I had come straight from the afterparty.
Anyway here is a vid of our time there. I'm in the black jacket and white pants, Sam the other way around. The last two shots are both me (all the helmet cam is- Sam feels like a robot wearing one), I just had to get a different set of skis and poles after that crash. Enjoy.

As I write this I see that Lachlan from the Daily Dump has already posted a video from my first day back in Chamonix. Check it out

Neil Williman and Ivar Svartholm Shred Chamonix TDDSR_2012_ep8 from The Daily Dump Snow Report on Vimeo.

I was only there for a day- on my way from Canada to Austria where I have just arrived and will be for 4 days for a team shoot with Fischer, stoked! Then back to Chamonix for the next FWT competition. I feel that I might be riding my luck too hard though- I booked my flights from Geneva to Salzburg last night and got them cheap (they're both small airports), got the last seat on the early airport shuttle through a friend of a friend, and then text messaged my team manager when I got here which happened to be when she was driving past the airport- so she picked me up dropped me where I needed to go. How long can this last? It's been happening for years. Thanks to all of you who help me make that luck, read my blogs to the end and are the wonderful people that I feel I am constantly surrounded by, I love you all. As an odd end note while I was waiting for dinner tonight I picked up an Austrian magazine, of course I couldn't read it but it had a double page spread article with a picture of each of Barak Ombama, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden and Hitler. I've never wanted to be able to read German so badly, I'd love to know how they linked those characters together.