The second leg of the 2014 Freeride World Tour took place early this morning UK time with the world’s best gathering to tackle a face off the Aguille Pourrie in Flegere.
As Nicolas Hale-Woods, the General Manager of the FWT explains in the video below, the face had been chosen because it had some “quite” steep sections mixed in with mellow playful sections with a whole load of different potential lines.
Of course everything is relative when it comes to the Freeride World Tour – a “playful” section of the face is still a 35 degree gradient, and when Nicolas talks about things being “quite steep” he means they’re anything up to 50 degrees!
Thankfully the weather decided to play ball, meaning the contest kicked off a mere half an hour late (pretty good for a contest that’s so dependent on conditions) and the riders threw themselves at it with a will.
Unfortunately (despite it being stream on our own site) Whitelines missed the majority of the live stream, as we were flying to the massive ISPO snowboard tradeshow in Germany, but we were told Sascha Hamm – representing the UK – rode well, landing himself in a respectable 8th place.
This, combined with his podium finish from last weekend in Courmayeur, moves him up to 5th place overall in the tour this season. The Swiss master of the steeps Emilien Badoux claimed first, moving into 4th.
Meanwhile Lib Tech rider Sammy Luebke’s 5th place was enough to keep him at the top of the tour rankings after his win last week. However the leader-board looks pretty fluid at the moment, and with four stops still to go on the tour, anything could happen.
Keep your eyes peeled for the video highlights from today dropping later on, and make sure to tune in to our live stream of the next event in Fieberbrunn, Austria, on February 1st (that’s next weekend!)
We’ll be rooting for our boy Sascha once again.
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