Skiing: New-look Scottish Freedom Series offers 'competition and community'
With freeriding in contention for a future Winter Olympics, a new format can help Scotland’s competitive series thrive, writes Roger Cox
The extreme sportspeople running the Freeride World Tour (FWT) have never exactly been shy, retiring types, but these days they seem particularly comfortable when it comes to blowing their own trumpet. According to their newly-revamped website, freeride skiing and snowboarding is “arguably the most exciting snowsport competition of the 21st century”.
They’re happy to compare themselves to the better-established disciplines too: “Forget placing slalom poles down the mountain,” the blurb continues, “forget building artificial jumps and halfpipes. Forget grooming the slopes even. Freeride contests are 100 per cent natural... the event is all about celebrating the terrain features found on any mountainside in the most exciting and elemental format possible. There’s a start gate at the summit and a finish gate at the bottom. That’s it. Best run down wins.”
The confidence is understandable. For one thing, the sport’s official status has recently been upgraded. For many years, freeride was the scuzzy, long-haired cousin of more clean-cut forms of snow-sliding competition, but in 2024 it was recognised as an official discipline by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) making its inclusion in the 2030 Winter Olympics, if not a certainty, then at least a strong possibility.
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In addition, there’s the simple fact that, well, freeride probably is “the most exciting snowsport competition of the 21st century.” Want drama? Howzabout people launching spins and backflips off enormous cliffs? Variety? Competitors have total control over the line they take, so no two runs look even remotely the same. Just as the man-against-nature dynamic of surfing blew minds all around the world when it appeared in the summer Olympics in 2021 and 2024, so freeriding has the potential to grab the global imagination if and when it makes its debut on the biggest sporting stage of them all.
This year’s FWT begins in Baqueira Beret in Spain on 16 January, and there are further stops at Val Thorens in France, Tetnuldi in Georgia, Fieberbrunn in Austria and Haines in Alaska before the grand finale, the Xtreme Verbier, which runs from 28 March to 5 April and requires athletes to tackle the imposing, craggy face of the 3,223m Bec des Rosses. Meanwhile, here in Scotland, the best freeriders in the land should have the chance to take part in their very own version of the FWT, the Scottish Freedom Series (SFS), with three events in the diary.
Last winter, the entire SFS season had to be cancelled due to lack of snow, but this year, rather than planning to hold contests on specific dates, the decision has been made to utilise waiting periods, in the hope that this will give events a greater chance of going ahead. For safety reasons, contests need to be run in or near existing ski areas, but Cairngorm, Glencoe, Glenshee and Nevis Range all offer suitable terrain.
The first event of the season, the GOAT, will take place at a location tbc some time between 10 January and 2 February; the Maverick is scheduled to take place some time between 7 February and 2 March, again at a location tbc; while the Coe Cup, Scotland’s original freeride event, first held in 2012, has an event window of 7-29 March, although in recognition of Glencoe’s long history of hosting it, the ’Coe will be the only location considered.
“Having these competition windows allows us much more flexibility,” says Snowsport Scotland CEO Iain Ramsay-Clapham. “In some ways it’s an organiser’s nightmare to have a window, because inevitably it doesn’t suit all the competitors, so you get smaller fields, and equally you have a real challenge around [the availability of] your workforce. But despite all that, I think this is completely the right thing to do.”
Athletes hoping to take part in SFS events will have to be ready to drop everything and head to the hills if the right conditions materialise on a given weekend, but the aim is to give as much prior warning as possible. “The weekend before [an event] there will be an indication that conditions are looking good underfoot,” says Ramsay-Clapham, “and by the Tuesday we’ll confirm that we pretty much know the location, but we’ll need to wait for the Thursday forecast to know if it’s going to be shockingly windy or whatever, so on the Thursday night we’ll give confirmation that we’re on.”
Although the SFS has been running for over a decade now, the number of people with the combination of skills and motivation necessary to take part is still relatively small – the average number of competitors per event is 55. Nevertheless, Ramsay-Clapham believes it plays an important role in the snowsports ecosystem.
“There are the young guns who come because they want to do well and go on to the Freeride World Tour qualifiers,” he says, “but then there are those who come just for the craic of a weekend with like-minded people. And then you’ve got people who are looking for an opportunity to be part of the community of freeriders, and I think there’s a really interesting space that the Freedom Series occupies now – it’s almost as much about creating a community as it is about competition.”
For more on the Scottish Freedom Series, see www.britishfreeride.org
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