Check out the top 3 runs from the men’s superpipe finals in Tignes last night. Louie Vito snagged top spot with a barrage of double corks, while Arthur Longo was the people’s champion due to going frickin’ MASSIVE with his tasty Gallic steeze. And by being French.

1. Louie Vito

2. Arthur Longo

3. Taku Hiraoka

Despite Shaun White and Ayumu Hirano’s absence, yesterday’s superpipe finals at the X Games in Tignes went OFF. Check the full recap…

We were also expecting to see the 8 players from yesterday in the pipe tonight, but Peetu Piiroinen got replaced last minute by Taku Hiraoka. So the starting list looked like this, in order of qualification: Louie Vito, Scotty Lago, Iouri Podladtchikov, Christian Haller, Luke Mitrani, Arthur Longo, Benji Farrow and Taku Hiraoka. Peetu out. Injury at the training? We learned later from the judges that he prefered to keep his mojo for the slopestyle tomorow. Strange, but nevertheless the young Japanese rider – always the reverse order from the qualis – sent it huge on his first hit and appeared to be quite consistent, except maybe on his final hit, which was a double cork. But it’s ‘nearly local’ Arthur Longo who gave the crowd its first occasion to go wild. He started off with a massive Front 10 and manage to keep his stratospheric amplitude all the way down, sending him high and clean, even on his Front dub. His score: 92. The crowd went mental.

Luke Mitrani bailed on his last hit – double, quite gutted. Then comes I-Pod, sent it huge all the way, including his back-to-back doubles, but scores… a surprising low 82 points. Vito is another one to complete his first run solidly, with 3 dubs including back-to-back with a back hand pretty much in his pocket. He scored 84 points for that run.

On his second run, Taku also landed his double perfectly on his last hit and improved up to 78 points, into 3rd place. Another big improvement from round 1 was for Luke Mitrani. At this point we wondered what goes in I-Pod’s head: maybe something like “what can I do to improve my score?” His 4th hit gave the answer: bail as he was presumably trying a 1440. Vito’s turn: his second double sent him a bit low but he managed to keep a fair amount of speed to finish off with a huge and stylish Crippler.

Scotty Lago stepped up to improve, went double with a double grab on his first hit, and then slowed down to just carve the rest of the course. Probably still hurting from his first run’s impressive slam on the angle of the coping. A little later his fellow American rider Vito started things off with a double Crippler, went for a back-to-back double, and falls.

Hiraoka is up first for the final run, and went even bigger and better than his first run. A run consisting in three 10s, a 9 and a 12. Ouch! That scores… 86 points, second place. You could see a lot of nervousness on Longo’s face waiting in the starting box for his last run. He put down his run, huge and stylish again, until his double cork attempt where he missed the grab and finished on his ass. He was still Gold medalist at this point of the night.

I-Pod was determined to do something special last night, and then did: after his (and Shaun’s) Double McTwist 12, he sent a sick Cab 1440 double – rapidly dubbed the YOLO Flip – on his 4th hit, followed by… a coping hug and a scary slam. Smiling but clearly shocked, he started throwing his board at the pipe, before throwing everything he can into the crowd, including his board. Stoked to land this Cab 14? A trick never seen in contest. Or hiding his disappointment with this massive grin? It looked like if he had the choice between winning the event or landing this trick, he would have chosen the latter – the one that probably gives you a bigger place in the history books of snowboarding.

Lago was definitely injured and passed on his third run, so it’s the final run of the night for Vito. The last man able to take the Gold off of Arthur’s neck, and shut down the excited crowd pumping for le Français since his first run – or more precisely since the qualis. And it’s a double fest. Double Crippler first, and back-to-back (Double Michaelchuk Vito’s style), and then 2 more… But all Indies, except for the last hit. It was definitely gonna be a close call for the judges, who took something that feels like hours to finally give the Gold to the American, with a 92.66, 0.66 point better than Arthur. Merde. I mean, the crowd seems to say that, of course. Appart from papa Vito, exulting from the crowd clapping and shouting. Oh well, the closeness of the score could make Arthur feel surely a bit gutted, but he’s certainly generally stoked to be Silver, just like Taku to be Bronze. “I had no pressure at all tonight,” Taku said afterwards. Imagine: he was not even supposed to take part tonight until Peetu’s cancelation…

Vito said after his win: “The pipe is always so good here. I was a bit nervous after the first run. But I’m super stoked because this morning I woke up feeling old because I just turned 25 yesterday”.

Tomorrow 10.30 starts the Slopestyle Men’s final, followed by the women’s slope. Stay tuned!

The burn dudes are back at it with another conceptual piece of shredit. Following on from last year’s Human/Machines they continue exploring snowboarding’s opposites by taking a look at backcountry and contest riding.

Picking up from where burn’s Human/Machines ends, POWDER & GLORY explores the two opposite poles of snowboarding—backcountry and contests—and is seen through the eyes of six burn riders at the height of their careers.

Riders: Gigi Rüf, Mathieu Crepel, Arthur Longo, Stale Sandbech, Werni Stock and Ulrik Badertscher.

Filmed and directed by Mike Hatchett and Travis Robb along with Brad Holmes, Logan Knutzen and Jeff Wright for Standard Films.

Music by Baron.
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If we understand correctly Volcom gave ten of their riders some budget to film their own video part, and now they are going to put them out one by one, starting with Daniel Brown on September, 3rd. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted!

IP2 is just about ready for your consumption. But first, here’s a little info…

IP2 stands for “Individually Produced Parts” . Whereas, each rider has 100% control of the direction, action and content collected to produce their own part for Volcom’s 2012 Snow project. We identified the riding characteristics of our team, matched them up with a videographer and gave them the green light. We are excited to share their personalities, travel experiences and shit they pulled off this past season.

Riders:
Curtis Ciszek
Jamie Lynn
Dan Brisse
Dylan Alito
Bjorn Leines
Scott Blum
Zac Marben
Bryan Iguchi
Seth Huot
Daniel Brown
Cody Beiersdorf
Arthur Longo

Finally! One of Europe’s finest, Pirate Movie Production, is back with their new 2012 snowboard film release, UNIQUE 8, and this is the first teaser.

This year, they cut down their roster of riders to eight people: Gigi Rüf, Marco Feichtner, Arthur Longo, Nicolas Müller, Kalle Ohlson, Teo Konttinen, Chris Sörman and Werni Stock. When we spoke to riders after last season, they all seemed to be pretty stoked on this clearer focus, and we think it shows in the teaser, too. PMP also switched from their beloved 16mm format to RED high definition digital cameras, but stayed true to their analog approach of titling.

“The UNIQUE 8 premiere tour will kick off in Innsbruck on September 14th and will gather snowboard enthusiasts worldwide to party and get hyped on the upcoming season.
UNIQUE 8 will be available on iTunes and DVD, which includes a 100-page art and photo book.”

pirate-movie-production.com 

As we hopefully conveyed in our Wängl Tängl 2012 report, the 10-year anniversary edition was the tits. Watch the video highlights of all the hammers from the finals…

And before it got called off due to a couple of horror slams, the skateboarding was not too shabby either. Here’s the best trick highlights

Here are the Pirates: “Our favorite Frenchy is giving you an insight look at his season. The first episode is about shooting in the back country with Gigi Rüf and Curtis Ciszek at the Arlberg, Austria.”

Tyler Chorlton's RIDS EG2

Electric Eyewear have promoted three talented Euro hotdoggers to their RIDS (Rider Inspired Design Series) program, so for next season you’ll be able to bag yourselves peeper protectors with design and colourways influenced by Tyler Chorlton, Arthur Long and Marco Feichtner. Check em. 

Electric Europe is proud to announce for ISPO 2012 the launch of Electric RIDS Goggles with Arthur Longo, Tyler Chorlton and Marco Feichtner.

Arthur Longo model.

Those riders will join the riders already on the RIDS program: Andreas Wiig, Pat Moore, Iikka Backstrom, Trevor Andrew, Peter Line, Jamie Anderson, and Cheryl Mass.

Marco Feichtner's model.

We’ll be catching up with the boys at ISPO next week, so stay tuned to Onboard for the lowdown.

www.electricvisual.com

The final installment of this season’s Pirate Logs sees the boys pitch up in Riks once again for some late-season awesome. Some bangers in this.

This last PirateLog of the “BottomLine” season is all about Riksgränsen. Every year the crew drive all the way up north to get the last back country shots for our main movie. Watch Arthur Longo, Kalle Ohlson, Chris Sörman and Markku Koski get it done.