Looking good: How aesthetics are taking over at the Olympics
The decision to include freeride snowsports at the 2030 Winter Olympics is symptomatic of a wider trend, writes Roger Cox
Last month, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed that freeride skiing and snowboarding would make their debut in the 2030 Winter Olympics. At the same time, they announced that the Nordic Combined discipline, comprising ski jumping and cross-country skiing, was to be dropped for the first time since its inclusion in the inaugural winter games in 1924.
The reasons for these changes, as stated by the IOC, were as you’d expect: freeride snowsports had been added because of their “rapid international growth” and because they are “visually spectacular”. Meanwhile, Nordic Combined was being ditched because of consistently low audience figures (“lowest in 11 of 14 assessed popularity metrics” over the last four Winter Olympics) and because only a handful of countries were ever in the running for medals, limiting its potential for audience growth.
Viewed in isolation, these changes sound as if they are simply about money: in a world where eyeballs equal advertising dollars, it surely stands to reason that less popular sports must eventually make way for more popular ones. However, the IOC’s switcheroo is also symptomatic of a more general shift. These days, sports where aesthetic considerations decide who wins seem to be in the ascendant, whereas sports where winning is simply a black-and-white case of fastest/highest/furthest seem to be losing some of their allure.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, the two freeride snowsports disciplines are very much about aesthetics. Unlike traditional downhill ski races, where the person who gets from A to B in the fastest time is declared the winner, in freeride the goal is to lay down “the most impressive run” between two points. Judges give scores based on five different criteria: line (as in: the difficulty of the route chosen down the mountain); control (how close to falling?); technique (side-slipping down a steep section or carving aggressive turns?); fluidity (how smoothly are different sections of the descent tied together); and air and style (the magnitude and panache with which aerial manoeuvres are executed).
Clearly all of these things are very much open to interpretation: there is no purely objective way of assessing whether Skier A’s backflip-off-a-cliff was completed more “stylishly” than Skier B’s. As the judging section of the Freeride World Tour website explains, however, this ambiguity is all part of the point: “The goal of our judging system is to ensure that any style of riding has the potential to win on any given day,” it says. “Whether a rider excels in steep terrain, big airs, technical tricks, or speed, each style should have a chance to win based on the most impressive run that showcases the rider’s strengths.” Or, to put it another way: the whole ethos of freeride is that there’s no “correct” way to get down a mountain – the sport is constantly evolving, and so the judging criteria must be designed to reflect that.
The most obvious point of comparison is the recent inclusion of surfing in the Summer Olympics in 2021 and 2024. Like freeride skiing and snowboarding, surfing heats are decided by five subjective judging criteria, and these bear more than a passing resemblance to those in freeriding. Again, the goal is to create a framework that rewards experimentation and progression, and, again, it’s the visual impression created by the athletes that matters.
Since its inclusion in the Olympics, surfing has certainly proved to be big box office. In the pandemic-hit 2021 games in Japan, even though the waves were far from ideal in the early rounds, the popularity of surfing was still credited with helping to shore up otherwise sagging global viewership figures. Then in 2024, with the contest held in the spectacular waves of Teahupo’o in Tahiti, the numbers were, well... certainly well north of whatever the Nordic Combined folks were ever able to muster, even in a good year. In terms of its global footprint, surfing brought in an estimated 46 million TV viewers, representing an impressive 58 per cent increase in viewership compared to its debut at the Tokyo 2021 Games. Take-home message: there’s a big market for sports like surfing, which occupy a social-media-friendly middle ground between sport and art, and that market is growing fast.
Of course, where the Olympics is concerned there’s a degree of irony in the fact that sports where aesthetic considerations determine who wins and loses are starting to displace those with more straightforward scoring systems. In ancient Greece, the original Olympic Games always had a strong (albeit unofficial) element of artistic involvement, with poets and artists vying for acclaim alongside the athletes. It was then the wish of Pierre de Coubertin, one of the founders of the modern Olympics, that there should be an artistic competition running alongside the athletic events, and from 1912 to 1949, sculpture, architecture, literature, music and painting were among the official Olympic disciplines.
Why was the artistic programme ditched after 1949? Partly because the inclusion of artists inevitably created a tension with the “amateurs only” ethos of the games, but also because the judges struggled to come up with an effective system for assessing entries. Somehow, though, art always seems to find a way.
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