Nike ACG Team Blog : News from the snowbard team

Hi ALL,

A little post to let you know than a part of the Nike ACG team in down in NZ for a bit more than a month.

Not that much of snow, but apparently, the weather's working hard to give us some White Gold.

It's actually snowing, but ssssslllllllooooooowwwwwwlllllllllyyyyyyyyy.......2 cm a day......

We had to put the chains on the car for the first day today, good sign!

We're riding everyday in Snowpark.nz, which is cool. Tha park is funny, but missing some true features!! (I mean a kicker bigger than 12m ...)

Tha rail set up is nice, with more than 8 different features.  Tha pipe is not done yet...

We'll let you know soon some more news, and never forget that, KEEP RIDING FOR EVER!!!!!!

Rich, Roy, Mirjam and Mati 

Well the guys have arrived in NZ without any problems wiht baggage which makes a pleasant first. there is not too much snow down there as it has been cold and clear however snowpark has managed to make enough snow so that the park still kicks ass. The guys will be down there for the next month shredding around so keep your eyes peeled if you see them and say hi.

they will be keeping us up to date with regular blogs saying what is going on down under.

G

Snowboarding without snow in England. Hmm. I wanted to see what´s that all about and we organised a trip to England with the Onboard guys and my Norwegian friend Freddy Evensen.

We flew to London and our plan was to rent a campervan and to go camping for a week in England, like we do in Scandinavia. OK, first of all there was the biggest music festival in England called Glastonbury so all the hippie style campervans were booked and Our travelling mate, Onboard writer, Tom who is English told us that if we want to get robbed we can go camping in Sheffield and the other places we were going to go.
So we did the trip the regular way and I booked the last car available at the Heatrow airport, stoked.

Sheffield was the first stop. They even had a plastic halfpipe there and some jumps. I had been wondering how could you ride a plastic halfpipe and it wasn´t that easy that´s for sure. We rode like beginners in the pipe but then we heard that it was so old so the plastic did not hold the edge of the snowboard. It was like riding on the ice without edges when it is sticky slush. What a combination! Peter from Onboard got some cool pictures thought in the small quarterpipe and some layback nosepress compinations with me and Freddy. I even had my worst snowboading experience riding plastic tendex moguls. Tendex is old style dryslope material and the new material is called snowflakes what they have on the parks.

Halifax was the next stop and they had a fun jump there. That snowflake was way better than in Sheffield and we had a really fun day and again we rode the whole day on plastic.

Last stop was Rosendahl plastic ski village. Hehhee. They had a small park there and a new pretty big quarter pipe. It was fun and three days was kind of enough of dryslopes for a while now. After we were done riding we went to Manchester United stadium and to Wimbledon to see Serena and Venus playing tennis. What a great trip and we even got some really good shots for the Onboard story. I´m so happy we get snow in Finland during the winter. Lets keep the climate change under the control, please!

A lot of the team were over in Les 2 Alpes last weekend for Gary Zebrowski's contest 'The Taravana Freestyle'. It is always a great event with a relaxed atmosphere - Tahitian style - and this year was no different although the weather definitely wasnt tahitian.

 The training day went well with Rich ripping it up while Marco and Mike competed in the wildcard contest. They unfortunately didnt make it through after some good riding but they didnt mind as it meant they could just enjoy the rest of the weekend.

 The following day was the slopestyle part of the contest which is added together with the pipe results to get an overall winner. Rich killed it and ended up on top going into the halfpipe contest on Monday, then the weather came in and the snow started falling so they had to cancel the contest at the last minute which meant that rich at least was guaranteed a trip to tahiti with gary in september.

It was a super fun event and Nike ACG represented well, hopefully one day Gary will take me to Tahiti as well.

G