Billabong Air & Style Innsbruck - Coming Soon

This weekend (well Saturday 5th to be precise) will see the second Air & Style contest of the season taking place in the spiritual home of the comp – the Bergasil Stadium in Innsbruck. What with the Oakley Air & Style China and the Nike 6.0 Air & Style Munich also happening this season, you’d be forgiven for getting confused. But thankfully, the concept for all three is the same, and it’s caveman-like in its simplicity. You build an enormous icy kicker, and you invite 16 of the world’s best riders to hurl themselves off it for the amusement of the baying crowd – in this case, 11,000 rowdy Austrians.

You pay the riders of course (there’s 75,000 euros up for grabs in Innsbruck!) and you also offer them the kind of TTR ranking points that only 6-Star events can bring. The Billabong Air & Style Innsbruck will see Seb Toots looking to face down his demons after he put himself out for the whole season by overshooting the kicker in practise last year. He’ll be up against the likes of last year’s winner Marko Grilc, Peetu Piiroinen and Eric Willet. Meanwhile, the annual rookie contest that takes place at the Bergasil Air & Style will feature our very own Jamie Nicholls as one of the invited riders – how cool is that? We reckon that makes Jamie the first Brit to compete in an Air & Style event since Danny Wheeler was invited back in the early 2008. You can watch him take on the world live on Saturday night on ttrworldtour.com