10 years ago, we were getting mind boggled at 14’s and it was unimaginable to think that we could progress much past this point, let alone at this rapid pace. Yet here we are- watching a kid who hasn’t even finished puberty spin six full 360’s and land with time to spare. What a world we live in.
There’s been some contention as to whether it also counts as the first quintuple cork, but we’re not FIS judges (thank fuck for that), so we’ll leave it up to you to decide on that front. Either way this teenager has just brought some real life SSX shit to fruition on the world stage. How much further can we push it? This is a big step in the rotational arms race that is professional Big Air, but to add an additional spin surely the jumps will have to get sizeably bigger.
Whatever your opinions on ‘spin to win’ and the future of competitive snowboarding this crazy feat of athleticism doesn’t detract from other aspects of the sport, and if you’d rather watch reruns of Terje tweaking methods then more power to ya. You can sit there and complain all you want about how you don’t like this side of snowboarding, but this is progress and progress isn’t measured linearly in snowboarding. It isn’t one or the other, style and amplitude aren’t mutually exclusive. So, congrats Hiroto, big up Reira and hats off to all the riders who put their bodies on the line to get us to this insane point in snowboarding.