Nike ACG Team Blog : News from the snowbard team

Gary and I went over to Zermatt last week to hook up with the Absinthe crew to shoot Gary's Nike ACG sweet spot. They arrived on the wednesday morning and began shooting straight away with a heli to get some intro and location shots. I arrived on Thursday morning in the pouring rain to find them heading back to Zurich to do some green screen shooting with all sorts of hi-tech camera equipment.

The advantage of the pouring rain was that up top is was dumping 50cm of snow which meant that when we went up on Friday everything was pristine white, the down side was that the pipe was full of snow. This meant that the morning was spent watching the pipe dragon shape the pipe for us. The driver did a great job and Gary was super happy with it.

 Gary rode super good nailing all the shots, it is going to look epic as the guys were doinig some filming on high speed cameras which is going to give us some great slo-mo shots.

It was my first time up in Zermatt and seeing the Matterhorn. It is an amazing place and perfect for a sweet spot, I was totally blown away with the location.

At the end of the day unfortunately Gary took a slam on a FS 1080 and knocked himself out for a couple of seconds. He was then fine although he couldnt remember anything of the day at all so we took him down to the doctor to get him checked out and stay there with them overnight. The good news is that he was fine the next day however we figured that we had got enough shots in the bag so everyone headed home.

Thanks to Gary and the Absinthe crew for pulling it all together, I think it is going to be a great sweet spot and I am looking forward to it.

 G

With the UK’s notorious lack of snow, the students of Leeds City invaded the indoor Sno!zone at Castleford to compete at the Leeds Varsity X Games. Nike ACG sponsored this grass-roots freestyle event which saw Leeds Metropolitan and Leeds University go head to head in a bid to decide local snowsports bragging rights. The competition was fierce and atmosphere intense as over 250 spectators gathered to support their respective university teams. In the end it was Leeds University snowboarders and skiers who were victorious, leaving Leeds Met to wait until next year before challenging the champions. The event also raised over £600 for Disability Snowsports – a worthy UK charity set up to help disabled people take part in snowsports.

http://www.disabilitysnowsport.org.uk/ 

It is the best time to ride in Finland on the spring time. Lapland was great again this year. We went to Ylläs first where we had some park riding and a river gap. It was cool except our filmer Rasmus hurt his back pretty bad jibbing at Ruka a week before. He was not complaining but looked terrible and left home after two days in Ylläs.
Ylläs was really chill but Wappu picnic at Ruka is the end of the season event in Finland where many finnish riders get together to have fun, party and ride. They had built there some cool obstacles again and it was really fun to be riding, but the weather was bad most of the time.
I can not believe how hard some of the Finnish riders are partying and they are still the first riders up on the slopes. For example one of the most talented finnish pros urinated on himself at six a clock in the morning and still was riding sick at nine in the morning, what´s up with the crazy finns, I´m definitely not a typical one. Anyway here are some pictures from the trip. I can´t believe this was the end of the winter season already. I hope you all have a great summer.

Jukka