Freestyle skiing, a highlight of EYOF, offers young athletes the chance to showcase their creativity and daring on snow. With disciplines like big air, and slopestyle, this sport combines acrobatics and skiing, providing an exhilarating experience that encourages expression and skill. Dive into the excitement and soar through the air!  

In slopestyle, athletes navigate a course with a variety of obstacles (rails, jumps of various types) and are judged on breadth, originality and quality of their stunts.

In big air, athletes ride down a slope with a ramp that they use to jump and perform different aerial tricks.

HISTORY

Freestyle skiing combines speed, showmanship and the ability to perform aerial maneuvers whilst skiing.

“HOTDOGGING”

There are records of people performing somersaults on skis at the beginning of the 20th century in Norway, Italy and Austria, and in the early 1920s, U.S. skiers started to flip and spin. Freestyle skiing really began to take off in America during the 1960s, when social change and freedom of expression together with the advances in ski equipment led to the development of new and exciting skiing techniques. Freestyle skiing was affectionately known as ‘hotdogging’. The name seemed to perfectly capture the breathtaking mix of acrobatic tricks, jumps and sheer adrenalin rush of the sport.

Freestyle skiing was contested as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Calgary Games. There were events for both men and women in all three events: moguls, aerials and ballet. Four years later, the mogul event gained medal status at the Albertville Games, as did the aerial event in Lillehammer in 1994. Ski cross made its Olympic debut at the 2010 Vancouver Games. Slopestyle and halfpipe were added to the freestyle skiing program at the 2014 Sochi Games.   

(source: https://olympics.com/en/sports/freestyle-skiing/).