I think we’re in an age where the halfpipes
are the best the world has ever seen.
If you look back at the ’98 Olympics,
it was pretty much a hand-dug trench
that was maybe 6 feet high.
And you compare that to a 22-foot superpipe
cut by Jeremy Carpenter, there’s no comparison.
The important parts of the halfpipe, I would say,
are the vert, the exit angle, the top of the walls,
where that places the athlete
when they leave the wall and come back.
That’s probably the biggest factor.
Then, of course, you’ve got the transitions at the bottom,
making the floor smooth, and trying to keep it
as edgeable as possible, the snow as soft as possible.
Jeremy does such a good job every year, cuts it perfectly.
In particular, from the transition
at the bottom of the walls into the other walls,
he maintains the flat bottom a lot.
So, it’s not a very big difference
between the walls and the flat bottom,
so you can really ride the transition through well.
Yeah, that’s why this one’s really good.
It really allows all the riders to push the amplitude,
push the trick difficulty, minimize risk even.
The better the shape of the pipe,
the more comfortable the riders are going to feel.
The cleaner your line is
through the pipe, the higher you’re going to go.
Every day we maintain it, because it's snow.
As people ski or snowboard it,
snow is falling away from the walls.
So, we continue to cut back into what we’ve already built
to keep it in a good shape.
And this takes 8 to 12 hours
because the snow is changing, the weather’s changing,
everything is changing all the time.
So, the science behind it would be more trying
to keep all the snow the same quality.
We need to sometimes take out the ice.
There will be ice veins in the snowpack
that we need to remove to try to come up
with the same product every day.
That’s the challenge.
To me, a good snowboard is definitely a stiff one,
with the right radius, a good base
to be fast in bad conditions.
And also, the tuning is really important
because we talk a lot about the boards,
but if your board is not well tuned,
you’re not going to go too fast.
We started building these boards
in Switzerland, in Winterthur.
The key factor for me about the factory in Switzerland
is that you can choose your own shape.
You can choose your own stiffness
and that’s individual.
A big thing that changes is the radius.
They won’t do a radius like we ride for any public.
It’s not fun to ride on the slopes
and that’s why we need custom boards.
We have been making snowboards
for professional riders for more than 20 years.
PHILIPP GOSSWEILER ELITE SNOWBOARD SHAPER
We are shaping boards for Toby Miller,
Pat Burgener, Scotty James, Dave Habluetzel,
Queralt Castellet, and many more.
We make them in a regular sandwich construction,
using a wood core,
fiberglass material, and carbon fiber.
A big difference from the industrial boards though,
is that we are using high-end materials only.
For example, our base material is a very hard-centered base,
and that’s one of the secrets of our boards actually.
That’s what makes the boards go so fast.
The flex is much stiffer on a halfpipe board
used in professional riding because you don’t want to have
your board going like that.
You want to go really stable and maintain that speed.
RIDING SCIENCE
In a halfpipe, the gravitational force
works in the direction of your slope
and gravitational force is first your engine
because it gives you speed going down the pipe,
but then also if you go out of the pipe,
it’s also like your limit
because it pulls you down to the center of the Earth.
If he goes up the pipe, his speed will decrease,
and he loses kinetic energy,
and then he goes up, up, up until the peak of the jump,
where you have the maximum potential energy,
but the kinetic energy is zero.
And then as soon as he starts to move down,
he loses his potential energy
and transfers it into kinetic energy.
In all alpine disciplines, you have two friction forces,
first is aerodynamic drag,
and the second is the friction
between your snowboard and the snow.
It’s important to minimize the friction
between the snowboard and the snow
to maintain and gain more speed
because then you will be faster,
and faster means higher jumps.
It is about finding the balance in your body,
and that’s why we work so much and we do thousands of runs
just to find the balance, find the middle,
how to release the edge when you get on the wall.
And at some point, you get higher and higher,
and you’re flying.