TTR Burton New Zealand Open 2010 - Halfpipe Finals

The men dropped into the pipe in the afternoon and perfect weather conditions continued for the men’s field.  Iouri Padladchikov (SUI) had a little trouble on his first run but came back to take the top spot with his second drop putting down a huge crippler, double McTwist 1260, frontside 1080 tailgrab, and a Cab 720.  With today’s result, Podladtchikov moved into World No. 1 in the Swatch TTR Rankings sitting behind current leader, Gjermund Braaten (NOR)   Japanese riders were out in full force and young 14-year old ripper, Taku Hiraoka, gave the men’s field a run for their money.  He threw down an excellent run to take second place.  And, American rider, Louie Vito, stepped it up with his second run to take home the third spot on the podium.

Today’s halfpipe competition marked the debut of the new Snowboard Live Scoring system (SLS), which takes a new approach to judging halfpipe runs.  Instead of looking at a rider’s overall run like the Overall Impression system, the new SLS system scores each hit in a rider’s run which are then combined with an overall flow score in order to provide a clear definition of how the judges arrive at a final score.  The SLS system was a success in today’s halfpipe competition and seemed to be well received by the riders.