If The Snow League’s slogan The Future Of Winter Sports Competition wasn’t already planted at stop one last spring, it has been firmly cemented in Chongli, China after a heated finals day at Yunding Snow Park. 14-year-old Patti Zhou took the women’s win at her home resort, standing on an otherwise entirely Japanese podium with Mitsuki Ono in second, and Rise Kudo in third. After what felt like an endless battle, Ayumu Hirano claimed the men’s win at the same venue he took Olympic gold, with Aspen’s reigning champ Yuto Totsuka in second, and Ryusei Yamada in third.
After a cold and windy qualifier, the conditions cleared and 16 riders showed up to battle it out in the brackets on finals day. When designing The Snow League format, founder Shaun White was seeking something new after a career of repetition. “The reason why we went head-to-head was, man, I’d just seen that [old] format for my entire career. This creates a lot more excitement, drama, and strategy.”
With nine months having passed since the inaugural Snow League event in Aspen, alongside a spring and summer of Olympic year training, riders turned up with strategy— knowing when to turn it on—giving the bracket format a chance to shine.
Riders are given two head-to-head runs before advancing in the bracket, with the option for a third run tiebreaker, which is how Patti moved ahead of Aspen’s highest scoring rider and third place podium finisher Gaon Choi. Women’s Aspen champion Sena Tomita took a fall in practice that had her pull out of competition, expressing Patti to the final bracket against the leading qualifier Mitsuki Ono. Ono claimed run one, maintaining her lead from qualifiers until Zhou took it back in run two forcing them to a tiebreaker where Zhou came out on top with a score of 79.66 to Ono’s 76.33.
Cam Melville Ives and Ryusei Yamada took it to a third run after each taking falls while wildcard Melville Ives attempted the first back-to-back triple cork in competition to no avail, sending Ryusei to the semis. Alessandro Barbieri overtook Ruka Hirano in a tiebreaker after Ruka was unable to land his run, placing Barbieri in his second head-to-head against Ayumu Hirano in the league series, which landed him in fourth for the second event in a row. A move that surely lit a fire in him we’ll be looking for at stop three.
With strategy building, and brackets forming, the threat of having to put down nine full runs started to creep in as third run tiebreakers were being called. Yuto Totsuka and Ryusei Yamada took things into their own hands after getting matched up. Ryusei slipped a third of the way down the pipe before dropping in for a single hit on the sunlit left wall with a switch back double alleyoop rodeo 900. Unable to ride away, there were no words. What was happening? Yuto slipped down to the same spot, dropped in, and landed the same trick. It was a one trick standoff in the middle of the bracket. I’m not calling it a coup, but these two made it clear that this is a rider’s contest.
While explaining what the format will bring to the league, Shaun says, “it’s challenging riders to have a bigger bag of tricks, more runs, and a little bit more endurance”.
Yuto’s one hit, one trick consensus with Ryusei paid off, when he landed a frontside double cork 16 tail in two of his three final runs against Ayumu. Yuto was unable to land his last hit frontside double 1440, taking it to the absolute end of the halfpipe before clipping the lip, losing the win to Ayumu.
“Ayumu wanted to win the first stop, but now he knows what he’s up against with the format, and it’s cool to see him come back and do what he did today”, Shaun says, looking back on event one in Aspen. Ayumu took it home in China after a three run bracket against Yuto, boosting 16+ feet out of the pipe on his first hit with a cab double 14.
If you missed finals live on Peacock, tune into the event recap on NBC December 21 at 4:30pm ET, and follow The Snow League to see what the rest of the season brings to the battle.
