There's a lot new at the Freeride World Tour (FWT) this season: new host region, (only) new venues and a new tour format. This year kicked off in Baqueira Beret, Spain, with the first FWT competition in Spain. It continued in the neighboring Ordino Arcalis in Andorra, which is now well known from the FWT. Finally, the whole tour circus flew to Canada to complete the first round of the FWT for this year in Kicking Horse after a year off due to Covid. If you want, you can check out the exact rankings and the replay here:
These three tour stops had several things in common: the snow was rather poor, not really soft for at least half of the categories and the venues were new for all participants. This meant that despite the rather poor snow conditions and not too spectacular faces, there were still some interesting competitions. Unfortunately, this season was almost exclusively limited to the men's ski category. Of course, the performance density in the men's ski category is significantly higher than in all other categories and some snow conditions are easier to master on skis than on a snowboard.
In the other categories, the snow conditions hardly allowed for good performances. In addition, the format with only 3 stops before the cut hardly allows for any mistakes. While, for example, Marion Haerty, who has been clearly superior in the women's snowboarding category for years, is no longer competing due to a lack of motivation, it is almost to be feared that the winner of the tour will be the one who has fallen the least. This is not to criticize the performance of the participants. In this case, it just showed that 3 runs in rather hard and difficult conditions, which hardly allow any mistakes, are very little to convince judges, who also do not allow any mistakes.
Judging is always very subjective and not optimal. You can ask yourself whether you can and should judge freeride lines. But if you look at the judging on the Natural Selection Tour, for example, where more attention is paid to the overall impression than the perfect execution of each individual trick, you can at least hope that the way runs are judged can develop further. Who wants to see almost exclusively safety runs when the "competition" also and especially the ladies really push themselves?
