Holy crap, Pat Burgener’s just blown our mind with this full part he assembled from last season’s footage. The kid’s a BOSS. Watch this…

This starts and we were all like ‘Yeah, Pat’s good at twirling at Big Air contests. Woop.’ But pretty quickly this morphs into a full-on backcountry assault from the Swiss rookie, with even some natural terrain hammers thrown in for good measure. We know, we know, we should have had an inkling from the shots he had in this year’s Absinthe movie, but this seriously rattled our cages in the best way possible. Hats off, Pat.

The Absinthe crew KILLED IT in St Luc filming for Resonance. Check out this frankly bonkers riding from Pat Burgener, Mat Schaer, Lucas Debari & Sylvain Bourbousson.

The Absinthe crew scores great weather, perfect snow and no shortage of terrain options in St. Luc, Switzerland. Young guns Pat Burgener and Mat Schaer send it during a double cork session. Sylvain Bourbousson, Lucas Debari and Mat tackle more natural kickers and lines.

Check out some of the stompers from the semis and finals of the 2012 edition of Freestyle.CH, all edited together in hyper-über-mega-mo.

And while we have your attention, you NEED to watch this edit below from the qualifiers. Skip to 00.40 and enjoy the best frontside 360 ever, performed by your boy Halldor Helgason.

[Semi-Finals Highlights]

Chas Guldemond Cab 12s his way to first. Thanks for the framing, dreadlocked photo girl.

Chas Guldemond twirls hardest to win the 2012 edition of the Freestyle.CH. Check the full report of today’s action in Zurich.

Despite Saturday’s washout the Freestyle. CH faithful’s spirit refused to be dampened and the 20-odd thousand souls who descended on the Landiwiese on Sunday were rewarded with clear skies, warm weather and banging snowboarding.

Amongst the usual mishmash of sticker crazed teens, blasting beats and an assortment of young stuntmen sending their steeds of choice skyward were the snowboarders, who got busy firing off rounds of doublecork variants, 1080s, 1260s and tweaked out slow spins.

Halldor Helgason didn’t make it past the Semis, but stoked the crowd with back rodeo Japans like this amongst double cork variants.

A welcome element of the FSCH format is the required Style jump to break up the barrage of rotations that define contest riding these days – at least in the Semis: for the finals this was dispensed with for some reason, and the number of jumps each rider had was also cut resulting in a slightly anticlimactic climax, compared to the Semis at least.

The battle for the 4 final spots was fierce, and the dudes were sending it hard to advance. Those who impressed most without getting the nod were Eero Ettala who landed his first ever switch double backflip to late switch backside 180 (“I prefer to land a new trick to winning any contest,” he stated), Halldor Helgason who seems as surprised as the anyone when he doesn’t explode himself – his front 10 double toedeos and double barrel rolls were insane – and Peetu Piiroinen who was also loving a bit of the front 10 dub off the toes.

Peetu Piiroinen mixed in smooth front 7s like this with front double toedeos.

But for whatever reason these boys didn’t make the finals. Ståle Sandbech, Chas Guldemond, Antoine Truchon and Pat Burgener did and, once the downhill bikers had finished flattening their own testicles into pancakes they headed up top for the two-hit final.

Two jumps, both solely scored in an old fashioned manner, meant that the riders had to just concentrate on hucking out their big hitters and this, unfortunately, lead to more slams than stomps. Ståle decided the time was right to unleash the triple but struggled to keep his rotation in check and ended up leaving a couple of hefty craters in his wake. The crowd were willing young Swiss buck Pat Burgener on but sadly there was to be no repeat of the semis, where he’d qualified first, as his usually reliable landing gear let him down, leaving newcomer Truchon to stare down the barrel of Guldemond’s heavy contest rep.

Pat Burgener has a tweak that belies his tender years.

He had a good shot at it, his stomped front 10 dub lacked a little pop but it could have been a good foundation for a blunderbuss of a second hit but, after Guldemond had executed a perfect Cab 12, he tried to answer but could only slam, leaving Chuck G able to blur himself through a Cab 1440 ( which he landed but reverted) safe in the knowledge that he’d bagged an unassailable position.

So Chas won his first ever Freestyle.CH crown and deservedly so. His riding might not be everybody’s cuppa, his energy drink board a bit of an eyesore, but he seems like a genuine, gracious gent and is certainly knows how to turn it on when it’s business time in a contest.

Props, Chas, thanks Zurich, and cheers to the weather for turning it on when it needed to. Till next year.

6th – World’s First Switch Backside 1440 Triple Cork

The exclusive Triple Cork Club found itself a new member back in April as young Swiss buck Pat Burgener manned up and, rather than follow in the footsteps of Mark McMorris and Seb Toutant (who’d earlier but down back triple 14s) sent one switch. Impressive spinnery.

5th – The Funnest Looking Snowboard Park Ever

We don’t need to write many words here. Look at it. Just LOOK at it. That thing looks so fun, and you guys thought so too. Posted at the end of February, this had y’all hyped enough to land it in 5th place.

4 and 3 drop in a couple days.

Last weekend we headed east to check out the 4-Star TTR Monster Fridge Festival in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. As well as an excuse to tour this historic city, get spiked by paprika and sup on Palinka, we’d heard good things about this inner-city Big Air event-cum-festival. We were not disappointed.

We’d been turned on to this event by the TTR’s Danielle, who was to head over to see what the gig was all about. She offered us a ride so, having never visited Budapest, jumped at the chance to hop in her car early Thursday morning and hit the road east. It’s a 7-hour drive and was foggy as hell, so we passed the time discussing the event’s potential (big was the consensus) and, ironically, getting deep into all the FIS/TTR Olympic stuff. Ironically because the next day all would be resolved with the TTR’s receipt of the FIS’s letter that was essentially a shit sandwich with glass in the butter. It was also interesting to get the off-the-record story of the recent developments, which involved clandestine meetings, Machiavellian plans, underground lairs and volcanoes that open to launch space rockets. Very Bond.

As we crossed the Danube from Buda to Pest we got our first look at the city. Impressive, but as we’re a snowboard rag and not a travel supplement we had to make a beeline to the contest site, directly adjacent to the broad Heroes Square and beside some eery Gothic castle. Not a bad spot. Accreditation in the bag we made a quick dip into Budapest for some sightseeing, eating goulash, getting spiked by paprika and having a gobby Yank student explain us the antiqued underground system, before it was time to check the style session. Due to our confusion with the underground, we missed the riding which was won by Sweden’s up-and-coming ripper Kevin Backström, but we were certainly bowled over by the throngs of young Hungarians swarming around the site. “Awesome, Scooter’s playing,” I said in jest as we wound our way in to the thumping mess of noise emanating from the stage. Only as we got to the site we discovered it was actually the Scooter – all 87 years and cropped peroxide hair of him – whipping the 30,000 drunk Hungarians into a frenzy. So 90s it was actually awesome.

In terms of scale, the Fridge Festival is kind of the size of Freestyle.ch, but without skate or MX or such a high caliber of riders. When the contest-proper kicked of Friday night with the qualifiers it was quickly apparent that for the most part the riding level wasn’t the ridiculously high standards we’ve been desensitized by in recent years. Having a large number of Hungarian, Czech, Polish and Slovakian rippers makes total sense but, without wanting to be harsh, I think they would agree that they’re not quite up to speed with where kicker riding’s at today. Back and front 7s were commonplace, as were fluffed lines on landing, but while on one hand it was refreshing to see these more stylish tricks for a while you did start to think, “Ok, right. So who’s gonna step up and actually send it?”

Unsurprisingly it was, with one notable exception, the Scandi contingent who brought the riding to levels we’ve become accustomed to. Kevin Backström, Ulrik Badertscher and Ståle Sandbech were flying the flag for contemporary hyper-spinning with front 10s, back 12s and cab 10s putting the event firmly in 2011. With the best 2 of 3 jumps counting, Badertscher looked to have clinched the win as he combod a cab double underflip with a back 10 and when Ståle (who’d qualified first) failed to land his own cab dub Ulrik’s win seemed a formality, but on his last jump young Swiss buck Pat Burgener stepped up and sent it long with a switch back 10 to add to his smooth cab 9, which sealed the deal and snatched the win. Attention was immediately switched to the main stage where the improbably named Infected Mushrooms dropped some electro-noise and whipped the bulging crowd into a frenzy with their Prodigy-lite sound.

Due to an unfortunate clash of dates with the Pleasure Jam, the overall level of riding at the event was maybe not what it’s size deserved but with the lure of a weekend in this east European metropolis, 30,000 people to send it for and long nights with (Scooter aside) solid music lineups and a glut of Slavic beauties to lose themselves in, there’s every chance that next year – schedule permitting – the Fridge Festival will lure a higher calibre of shredders to the Heroes Square and take the event to the next level. It has the potential.

FINAL RESULTS

1 Pat Burgener 186.5 pts
2 Ulrik Badertscher 180 pts
3 Kevin Backström 166.75 pts
4 Matevz Peter 157 pts
5 Staale Sandbech 141 pts
6 Michael Macho 120.5 pts
7 Jan Necas 96.75 pts
8 Zebbe Landmark 58 pts

News just arrived that Swiss rookie and Nitro rider Pat Burgener stomped the world’s first switch backside 1440 triple cork. Considering he did this at his home resort in Crans-Montana in slushy conditions (with hardly any snow left for that matter) this is even more impressive. And it also makes us disregard the fact that the trick includes a considerable hand drag.

We are quite stoked over here that of all possible riders it was Pat, a young European, who laid this trick down. Even though quite young Pat has worked his way up the ranks with quite a few respectable contest results this season, including a halfpipe victory at this year’s Swiss Championships in Zermatt, and a second place at the slopestyle event of the Burn River Jump in Livigno.

We are sure we’ll see at lot more from this promising young man!

2 Alpes sure is the place to be right now. Here’s some of the funtimes the Nitro crew had the other week. Gotta love them back 5 High-Fives! We’ll be bringing our own edit of the Forum International team’s week shortly, so stay tuned for that bad boy.