Peetu Piiroinen wins London FIS World Cup Big Air

So Saturday saw London host its first ever FIS World Cup big air contest. And the locals were out in force to watch it – tickets were sold out as 10,000 people headed to the grounds of the coolest building in London, Battersea Power Station, to watch the snowboard action and a decent line-up of bands.

You could see the jump from miles around – the rig apparently being the one also used for the Air & Style contest in Germany. It was so tall (35 metres to be precise) that the riders had a lift to get them to the top. It got pretty windy at the bottom so I dread to think what it was like up at the top.

The spectators also had the luxury of a big screen providing footage from the top, slow motion replays and scoring information. You could tell the FIS beast was in town.

We missed the qualifiers but come the finals earlier in the day but we were a little surprised to see some of the bigger names in the sport – including Danny Kass, Markku Koski and Risto Mattila – missing from the final line-up.

Still it gave Danny more time to tune up his voice for his performance with Burton team rider Trevor Andrew and his band Trouble Andrew later in the day.

But back to the big air, there was a heart-stopping moment early on in the finals when one of the riders spun right off the side of the kicker, narrowly avoided decapitating the photographers and crashed into the (unpadded) wall. But he was okay and found the breath for a bit of a chat with MC Tim Warwood before heading back up the jump again.

Peetu Piiroinen won the contest with a cab 1080, a backside 900 rodeo which didn’t count towards his final score, and then completing his attack with a cab 900.

Stefan Gimpl took second place and Belgian rider Christophe Reynders  came third.

 “It went really good but actually I didn’t expect this at all as I couldn’t get along with the small kicker and was too slow in the inrun,” said Peetu after his win. “I couldn’t do my tricks but in the end I was doing better.”

As ever it was the flips that won the biggest cheers and Scotty Lago’s double backflip to (very) late backside 180 gained him the contest’s best trick award.

An impressive proportion of the crowd stayed for the LG Airbag tour final (results to come). We did have to do a bit of shuffling though to avoid the ever growing puddles of water forming from melting snow.

Then it was into the massive big blue tent to relive the 90s with Cypress Hill – it was utterly rammed so we snuck off home to dry our feet out.

A great day out and an impressing event to bring to the capital – here’s hoping they can do it again in the future. I’ll just remember my wellies next time…