Halfpipe won't matter in a few years anyway.
From the
WSJ article text:
The Halfpipe Was Set to Rule Winter Sports. Now It Is Dying
Fewer snowboarders dare plunge down the larger pipes’ walls, so many resorts have stopped building halfpipes
Snowboarder Shaun White of the U.S. trains at Phoenix Snow Park, Pyeongchang, South Korea. PHOTO: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS
By
Rachel Bachman
February 11, 2018
32 COMMENTS
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea—In the halfpipe’s biggest moment, snowboarder Shaun White flipped and twisted above the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, grabbing the gold and beating TV juggernaut “American Idol” in the ratings.
Eight years later, that halfpipe is gone, and many more are vanishing.
Only 13% of U.S. ski resorts last season had a halfpipe, the giant, open-face cylinder through which riders swoop and fly. That was down from 34% a decade ago, according to the National Ski Areas Association.
Only 8% of ski areas last season had a superpipe, a halfpipe that’s Olympic sized or close to it.
An appetite for bigger and bolder tricks fueled a near doubling in size of Olympic halfpipes to 22 feet high from 11.5 feet at the event’s 1998 debut. Ski resorts upgraded to bigger halfpipes, which are pricier to build and maintain. But far fewer riders dare plunge down the larger pipes’ walls, so many resorts have stopped building a halfpipe altogether.
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“There’s days when I show up and I think, really? This is what I do?” she says. “We need to make halfpipe snowboarding approachable. I think it’s essential to the future of the sport. Every resort should have a 12-foot halfpipe.”
The biggest decline in halfpipes has come at the local and regional ski areas where much of the public first tries them. Peak Resorts, which owns or oversees 14 ski areas from Missouri to New Hampshire, has just two halfpipes. A decade ago, it had a halfpipe at nearly half of its resorts, says Elia Hamilton, Peak Resorts’ VP of terrain development.
Hamilton says bigger halfpipes have driven down use and made resort owners question why they’re making them. He compared halfpipes’ decline to that of the ski jump—an Olympic event in which the U.S.
hasn’t won a medal
since 1924.
Edit: Take out full article text due to copyright
