Red Bull Skiing

LIKE A LION - TEASER from Inspired Media Concepts on Vimeo.

Women's Slopestyle went down today under beautiful partly sunny skies at Butttermilk as Winter X Games 14 kicked off. Red Bull veteran Grete Eliassen, who is also a veteran of last year's slope podium, brought down three solid runs all of which included as nasty 900 on the big bottom jump and slide easily into the bronze medal spot just behind Keri Herman.

Way out in front of the field with three 90-plus point runs was Red Bull Ski Team newcomer Kaya Turski. Kaya brought the heat on her last run with a 270 disaster, 450-off the canon, switch 900, 540 and switch 720 off the big bottom booter to give her a score of 96.66 and an 11-point lead on the competition.

All in all, not a bad afternoon as the Red Bull Ski Team nabs two of the first three medals award at WX14.

Check out the full gallery action!

Red Bull Skiing is excited and proud to welcome Kaya Turski to our ski team. With the paint on her helmet only one week fresh, Kaya is already killing the competition (see above).

The 21-year-old Canadian has only been on skis an astonishing 5-years, two of which were plagued with injury, but Kaya's penchant for rails and big air began earlier on the unforgiving battle-field of inline-skating. She stumbled upon skiing almost on accident, and boy are we glad she did.

Coincidentally, Kaya has a nice profile in the February issue of Powder Magazine on news stands now. Pick one up and check out page 96. In the article, Mike Douglas is quoted as saying, "Any comp she doesn't fall in, she'll win." Well said, Godfather.

Jon is still on the fence on whether or not he will release this one to the masses at X Games Big Air on Friday (between 7-11pm EST on ESPN). From Jon:

The Tornado.

I actually thought of that name a year ago when I was first working on this trick in my head, at that point I thought I had it, so I set up a kicker in Trysil to try it out, but after a few days of visualization I realized that I wasn't ready, I couldn't feel it the way I needed to!

Then this summer as I started to give ski racing more and more of my focus I thought to myself that I guess my days with doing new tricks are over, that I would have to work on the ones I had. Then during the city Big Airs this fall I started to feel really good in the air and the thought of the trick came back into my head.

Once again this year, RedBullSkiing.com is a proud partner of the Powder Video Awards set to go down in Aspen on Saturday, January 30th. It's the monumental 10th anniversary for the only ski movie award show in the industry and it's sure to be poppin' off. If you won't be in Aspen like most of the world won't be, don't fret, you can get a front row seat to all the action with the live webcast. There's sure to be some good action from the Red Bull Skiing camp this year, especially with Sean Pettit's heavy-hitting segment in MSP's In Deep. Pettit had breakthrough performer last year, this year (yes, we're calling it now) Pettit will win Best Male Performance.

Make sure to tune in to powderawards.com, in the meantime check out some of the madness that went down last year.

C.R. Johnson gave us access to his helmet cam footage. Here's a nice little look into how a Linecatcher athlete picks through the course and figures out their line...

Most of the skiers arrived to France in Marseille on the Mediterranean Sea. An inch of snow covered the palm trees outside the airport and our shuttle driver said it snows in Marseille once every 10 years. This was a good sign.

After an interesting drive to Vars in a front wheel drive van, we arrived with only one side of the tire chains functional. A meter of snow had turned the little French Alps town into a winter wonderland.

The Red Bull Linecatcher event couldn't have gone off more perfectly. One day to shred and fight off the jet lag, and two days of bluebird for the qualifications and the final event to go down. The eventual winner was Candide Thovex in his first comp since his injury. Red Bull's Sean Pettit took second and the "Sick Bird" award for a 360 off a 50-footer in an uncharted part of the course. C.R. Johnson also had a comeback of sorts in his first podium since his head injury in 2006. 

Check out the Super Gallery for all the pics!

Considering all the variables working against an event like Red Bull Linecatcher, it's really amazing how well it went off yesterday. The Vars valley in France was hit with a meter of cold powder the day the athletes arrived in town. After a successful qualifying event, two french skiers were pulled into the elite field including Red Bull's own Sean Pettit, Richard Permin, Sven Kueenle, and Bene Mayr.

France's own Candide Thovex topped the field to take the title, while Sean Pettit stood aside him in second and C.R. Johnson took third. Check out the video below: