Board Meeting...

“Peetu was unbeatable today. He was the best in the final as he was the best in the qualifiers, he deserved to win,” runner up, Austrian Stefan Gimpl conceded. “The location was wicked and the spectators were amazing,” he added.

While it took Lords, Ladies, Prime Ministers and David Beckhams to win the Olympics for London, the International Ski Federation was persuaded to backyard Battersea’s LG Freeze with its Big Air trials by an equally driven, but altogether smaller team. London event specialist Sports Vision worked with Snowsport GB to secure the cup, and Events for London for the rights of passage.

“Never thought I’d play a gig at the bottom of a ski slope in London, but it’s awesome,”

Iglu frontman Jarvis Anderson

As well as steering a proven real snow slope from Alpine highs to urban lows, the recipe blended big beats in a six pole, 3,000sq m Kayam, from the likes of DJs Annie Mac and Trouble Andrew, together with fitting rock acts, Cypress Hill, The Enemy and Iglu & Hartley among them.

Backbone

“The [gig] was thrown into the tour, it was a little candy, a little gem. Part of the reason I’m so stoked on this is the snowboarders here that I’ve always looked up to, that now I get to meet.”

Iglu frontman Jarvis Anderson

While Nussli might sound like a European term of endearment, since 1941 it’s been a Swiss construction company, latterly with considerable clout in the winter sports business. It has built more than 25 ramps, everywhere from its Alpine homeland to Austria, Bulgaria and Spain. In London, Nussli teamed nine of its own people with 12 ‘locals’ to execute the 31m high, 80m long focal point for the LG Freeze, to FIS regulations.

“The jump was last installed in Zurich city centre,” project manager Martin Blackburn explained. “Battersea obviously is a unique site, but the ground conditions are not dissimilar.”

From the Nussli perspective, indeed from the Sports Vision overview, while it didn’t come cheap, and required painstaking groundwork to get fit for purpose, it’s a big, open space with easy access, benefitting the equipment for the jump. Not least 160 tonnes of steel and wood, and 58 tonnes of counterweight, shipped direct from Switzerland on 12 40ft lorries.

“[It meant] we managed to complete the build in half the 10 to 12 days originally allocated, which saved an extra week in rental cost,” Blackburn said. “It’s amazing that Sports Vision has the guts and the balls to bring something like this to London with a long term vision. It’s a great team and a fabulous project,” he added.

So why did a company steeped in the success of Rip Curl Boardmasters step across the tracks, from Newquay to Battersea, and put the big Freeze on (in) the capital? The aim is similar. To integrate the sport and music markets, thereby extending the fan base for snow sports in Britain, which has a relatively short competitive history compared with the likes of football, cricket and rugby, according to group director Andrew Topham.

“We’re about building a portfolio of [tournaments] that complement each other,” he said.

Funding

“We’ve launched this from scratch through revenues from the portfolio,” event and production manager for Sports Vision, Jamie Monson, told Access in his Elliott Hire office on the penultimate afternoon.

“More than likely we’ll make a loss this year, but it will make money in time. Channel 4 have been fantastic, they’ve given us an advertising campaign, which we would never have been able to afford, and without the TV coverage we couldn’t put on the event, period. But they by no means cover the costs. Ticket revenue’s a key part of what we do.

“We had a struggle to find a location big enough to cope with what we wanted to do,” he continued. “Not the space, but the size of it. We looked at indoor venues like Earls Court, but there’s the problem with the height. Here we have the space and the backdrop. At this time of year, with a lot of heavy duty vehicles coming in around the clock, you don’t want to be working on grass and spending a lot of money on trackway. And if you tell someone it’s at Battersea Power Station, they know exactly where to find it too.”

The build started with the Nussli jump, the Friday before, which took four days to complete. The Kayam and the other big structures were in by Sunday, with the rest of the site complete midweek.

“We didn’t start making the snow until Wednesday night,” Monson said. “Time is money, so you put these things together quickly and take them apart even quicker,” he smiled.

Development at the Power Station site, owned by Treasury Holdings, has been pending for some time, and work should start in earnest before too long. Meantime though, it’s no billiard table.

“We had to fill in holes under the Kayam with hundreds of tonnes of bricks, so they did well out of that, and obviously we paid them quite a large fee, so I’m sure they love events like this. But then they’re spending a lot on the upkeep of the [Power Station],” Monson shrugged. “We hope to come back here until the building kicks in.” Between the lines, that could mean two more Freezes in Battersea, subject to licence.

“At the moment Wandsworth is very happy with how we’ve been running the event,” Topham said.

Parallel turn

While the ‘Battle of Britain’ scheduled for the last day had to be cancelled on the back of persistent heavy rain throughout the night, by then the competition proper was complete, and Piiroinen $25,000 richer, with organisers confident throughout that the elements couldn’t kill the competitive elements.

“The Kayam tent can accommodate most of the crowd, and with the other VIP bars you wouldn’t have to stand outside,” Monson explained. “And while it’s not much fun, the snowboarders could keep jumping. Technically rain wouldn’t stop the event.”

Whether it again stretches across four days or is reshaped over two or three remains to be seen, but with the attention it attracted, both in terms of column inches and feet through the turnstiles, the Freeze core will be bigger in 2009.

“If you try and grow something like this too quickly it can come off the rails,” Monson said, “but we would like to increase capacity a bit, maybe to 15,000 next year.”

Keep a close eye on that space.