NEW YORK — For more than a month during the snowless summer and fall, the U.S. ski and snowboard jumpers were still out on the slopes of the Utah Olympic Park practicing their jumps all thanks to the recent installation of a ramp lined with an innovative artificial snow and giant downward sloping air bag.
The product of multi-national R&D and a major fundraising effort called Project Jump, the new air bag has dramatically increased the volume of the Olympic hopeful’s training while minimizing the chance for harm.
“Our sport is so high-risk, high-reward, and it kind of takes that risk aspect out of it,” Team USA freeskier Maggie Voisin said at a recent promotional event for Visa. “Of course, if you land funny, there’s still that chance of getting injured, but it takes [away] the mental side of being scared or intimidated. You just go out there and send it with that confidence.
“It’s a game-changer. It’s going to change the sport, for sure.”
Voisin, an Olympian in 2014, makes Park City, Utah her year-round home so the new setup was a welcome and convenient complement to her training. She went to New Zealand for on-snow training during part of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, but for rest of the offseason, the air bag jumps are more practical preparation for the Olympic qualifiers than focusing solely on a conditioning and strength program in the Center for Excellence training facility.
So much of her sport requires fine-tuning of detail in jumps to impress the judges, and that can only be replicated on the slope. Of the new air bag, she said, “Essentially it’s like this big pillow. They’ve had them for years, but they were just flat. But they got downward sloping ones so it’s more realistic to how we land.”
Jeremy Forster, program director for the U.S. snowboarding and freeskiing teams, said the flat air bags produced an impact that was “still pretty significant.” The other off-snow training remedy — landing jumps into a million-gallon pool — was a decent alternative for skiers, but the surface area of a snowboard heightened the force of impact, making repetitive training unwise.
The slope of the air bag also adds a new dimension: a realistic simulation of the landing target.
“It’s certainly a safer way to learn tricks and progress through the tricks they want to learn, knowing that they can land on the air bag and the air bag is obviously pretty forgiving,” Forster said. “It also simulates the angle they want to land on. I just think all the variables make it a really good training environment.”
The ski slopes in Japan have had several publicly available sloped air bags, so the U.S. team visited last year on a reconnaissance mission of sorts to scout the various options. They ultimately opted for a landing surface from specialty manufacturer Progression Air Bags, a ramp topped with an artificial snow from Chinese company JF Dry Ski and project oversight and construction handled by Snow Park Technologies. Financial services executive Brandon Hunt, whose son Chandler is on the U.S. snowboard team, led the fundraising drive.
Forster said most artificial snow materials are a brush-like stuff fiber fabric whereas the JF Dry Ski surface is plastic with an enoki mushroom shape (long stem and tiny top) that the snowboarders, in particular, have found conducive to carving and setting an edge.
Most of the elite Olympic athletes added between 25 and 35 days of training between snow camps, Forster said, while regional clubs will have opportunity to use the air bag jump, too, a development that could help the sport’s reach and accessibility.
While the Park City location clears the air bag away in the winter to use the slope for snow jumping, Mammoth Mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada range recently made a permanent air bag installation that will operate adjacent to a snow jump.
“That side-by-side ability at resorts in the springtime makes it a really powerful training tool as well,” Forster said.
As for Voisin, who has finished first and fourth in the first two of five qualifiers, she is in good position to return to the Olympics, although at Sochi she broke her fibula during a pre-Game training run and could not compete. When asked what new developments fans should keep an eye on at PyeongChang, she said double jumps, a feat so far “rare” among the women, she said. Asked if she would be trying a double herself — after all this additional jumping work — she remained coy.
“I mean, you never know,” Voisin said with a laugh. “When the time comes, it could happen.”
