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June, 2020
A major new snowsports event will replace the 2020 Winter Games this year. Itll be New Zealands biggest snowsports event this year and will become a fixture of the normal programme in future. You get served lemons, you might as well make lemonade, Winter Games New Zealand boss Marty Toomey said when announcing details of The Obsidian replacement event recently. Its a four-event snowsports competition, the likes of which hasnt been done anywhere globally before. Unlike other major events up and down New Zealand, which pulled the pin almost as soon as Covid-19 made its unwelcome entry to our shores, Toomey says Winter Games New Zealands team decided to sit tight and think on their feet. Wed done a bit of a strategic review at the end of last year which looked at some of the events we had on the programme and [we] said, actually, lets just shift ourselves a little bit. Three co-ed teams, comprising seven of New Zealands most talented skiers and snowboarders per team, will be led by captains Janina Kuzma, Sam Smoothy and Jossi Wells across the four events Freeride, which will be heli-accessed, a Park Jam and Aerial Attack, both at Cardrona Alpine Resort, and a backcountry Shred Session where each team shreds up a local resort. Wells says the event will showcase the countrys diverse talent pool in snowsport, including X-Games, World Cup, Olympic and Freeride World tour competitors as well as back-country specialists. To have the opportunity to bring all these athletes together & is what I see as a celebration of all that has been accomplished across the board. Each teams going to have its own film crew, which will capture and edit footage throughout the event the edit of the Shred Session will be judged, but the rest of the contents designed to go to broadcast partner Sky TV, and to the likes of Destination Queenstown to help with winter promotion, Toomey says. Theres also an overall videography competition running alongside The Obsidian each team will create a five-to-eight-minute compilation of their teams journey, and those will be premiered in Queenstown and Wanaka at the end of August as a community event to support the local snow industry. Its all going down in the weather window between August 10 and 20. Rather than saying its 10 days of full-on action, we want the best possible days to get out and do the big backcountry events, it demands perfect conditions, Toomey says. So whenever the weather is right well pull the trigger on that event, and the other events work around it. The athletes, he says, are frothing about the new-look event and played an integral part in its design. Weve had this built for athletes by athletes & weve tested with them early on whether it was of interest before we even went back to [major funder] NZ Major Events, so its definitely an athlete-focused event which is, again, another really cool element of it. They all had the end of the northern hemisphere snow season cut short, and many of them were in really good form, so thats pretty gutting. Then they thought, given the border closures, nothing would be able to happen in NZ so, all of a sudden to be presented with something thats really cool and competitive and will challenge them, theyre just fizzing. Toomey says the quality of the entirely NZ competitor base yet to be fully revealed is exceptional. Weve got our future Olympians, weve got our Olympic medallists, weve got our past Olympians, our Freeride World Tour athletes, those just coming on the tour next year, those who have won on the tour historically you put them all together, youve got an incredible mix, which in itself will be really interesting to see how the teams work. But, he says, therell be a few tricks up the sleeve, including joker cards which teams can play to double their points. Its not going to stop. Youre not going to know until the very end whats happened. The Winter Games New Zealand teams keen to run it as an international challenge as part of the 2021 traditional games where teams from each country battle looking for the King and Queen of the mountain. Toomey says hes thrilled the events come together in such a short time they only started seriously looking at it in March and is grateful to NZ Major Events, in particular, for backing it. [It] has been a significant funding partner for the event for quite a while, so a lot of this going forward is contingent on whether NZ Major Events saw the benefit, given we werent going to be able to have the international athletes. They actually bought into it, so that was the critical piece that allowed us to say, yes, we can make this work. Theres no risk of the event not taking place. Source: Mountain Scene
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