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It’s always hard to skip powder days because of the contests, but in this case it was worth it

Gloryfy bastards was a contest with the best format ever. Hitting the biggest hip of my life in Gerlos at night was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.

I came to Gerlos on Friday night and missed the training and when I saw the feature I was blown away. A perfect shaped hip almost in the middle of the village was looking really cool and pretty big. 18m of flat at the top which looked sketchy to hit over but soon this myth was busted when I started to hit it during morning practice.

Within 6 attempts I decided to go a bit faster and jumped over for the first time. Came a bit short but everything was ok.

Qualifications started with a jam session of snowboarders before skiers and snowboarders didn’t step it up. One of them made it over with a backside 180 and that scared me a bit because my first goal was to do some cool tricks over.

It was snowing and there wasn’t much speed. Our time was up and the skiers were all pumped. I did a couple of jumps on the side and then surprised everyone by doing a smooth 540 over the whole thing. Since then everything just went crazy. Everyone saw that it was possible to do so they stepped up their game as well. It was madness already in Qualis. My team-mate and I made it through to the finals which was pretty cool.

The finals started with a best trick session where I made a mistake and didn’t land my 900 tail. But the team finals were still ahead of us. We did a run with his 180 and my 540 and decided to go for all or nothing on the second run. We didn’t make it so we had to be pleased with 3rd place which is  pretty ok for this invitational contest that had also beaten me up so many times before with big crashes.

Once I came up short and knocked my knee into my face and broke a lens. Another other time I went for a 9 and as soon as I came out I knew it was going to be big. I couldn’t see anything in mid air, but when I came out, I saw I was still 5m too high for a sweet landing and landed really deep and ejected out of my skis. The feature was 10m high and as you can see from the photo that I was already pretty high, so you can imagine how big the crash was.

As soon as I came home I got a call from my friends saying that powder time was on and we built a kicker in the back-country and got no shots which was a bummer.

Today, however, we went across one peak and found a perfect playground which helped us shred the best pow of the year and put a big smile on our faces.

So many things can happen in just a few days and I’m already stoked about the new snowfall which is coming in a few days!