Behind The Scenes at the Freeride World Tour | Kicking Horse, Golden w/ Paddy Graham

Is he going to do it? The George Rodney EF uses Saki to ease off and stomps again! Where's Craig? Where's Craig? Then we go to Japan. And tickle the belly of the beast. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the series that delves deep into the underworld of freeride competition. We go behind the scenes of the Freeride World Tour and tickle the belly of the beast that produces some of the most incredible ski and snowboard action on the planet. This is face value! The Freeride World Tour is a series of competitions that spans the globe, reaching five destinations. First up, Hakuba, Japan. Sushi, deep pound. From Hakuba, it's time to spin around to the other side of the globe to Kicking Horse, British Columbia, where it's time to get rowdy. From Kicking Horse, we're going to head over to Europe, straight to Ordino Arcalis, Andorra. From Andorra, it's crunch time, Fieberbrunn, Austria. That's where the riders are battling it out for a place in the finals. The finals in Verbier, it's the Bechner Ross. It is one of the most extreme faces on the tour. That's why it's called the Verbier Extreme. That's where we're going to be getting the winner from, Verbier. I can't believe I got all those in first go. Enough of that. It's time to go skiing. I'm about to go meet Logan. See you there. You've not even got your first skin on yet. I'm working on it. How long do you reckon it's going to take to get to the top? An hour fifteen. Hour fifteen. Bang on. This is seriously the biggest tour I've done in a few years. How many years were you on the tour before you quit? Full time, four years. You had some very good results in that time. What made you decide to stop and what made you decide to come back this year? What made me stop was I was just away from home so much. I really just felt like I was missing out on my own backyard. And then coming back, I was just doing the wildcard spot for the Canadian stop. Figured I was the right person to do it. I saw that incredible picture of you jumping over the train. Oh, the train gap, yeah. Was that scary? It was scary. Mostly because I was there by myself at the start. Just straight airing in and I wasn't really good at backflips at the time. My mom, who lives in town, would tell us when the train was coming by. Oh yeah, and then it was a five minute countdown. Oh, it was like an hour. What do you do on competition day? Where's peak stress moment for you, just before dropping in or waiting? Probably the night before. Oh, really? Really trying to decide, finalise the line. Just thinking about all the consequences and the stuff that can go wrong. We just headed up the mountain. We're on the gondola at Kicken Hall, so we're going to go get sick with the girls. Who's getting rad? I'm going to get rad. Even the cameraman's getting rad. I'm going skiing with Paddy here, so he can teach me how to do a 1080 off a cliff. Pressure's on. I want to try, take speed from the pine tree, come straight into here. Pop off before, pre-pop before this, and try to land like close to that snowball. It's all about taking smart decisions. That'd be crazy. That was really big. Let's go make a considerably smaller jump than that. Do you need this? It looks pretty decent to say we've built that in like 15 minutes. Hard work pays off. Just remember that you don't have to fully tuck it hard because the jump's already quite poppy. You just let the skis go off the lip, and then you just let back. You can kind of pop a little bit as well if you want. Thanks for sketching, man. I'll take payment when we get back to the car. That was awesome. The sickest afternoon. Not the biggest jump, but it was so much fun. If you ever get the opportunity to go out there with your friends, I highly recommend it. Yeah, awesome stuff. Craig McMorris is in town. He just slid into my DMs. You might be used to seeing Craig in more of a snowboard film environment, and he's even just finished up shooting the X Games Real Snow. We've got a wild card for the event. We're going to go meet old mate Andy Brown and have a look around the town of Golden. Where to first, my friend? Go to the museum. Show you how this whole town started. I'm going to go look for Bulldog Kelly's gold. That's what I'm going to do. How many people are living in Golden? About 3,700 people in the town itself. It's a pretty small town. We have this area called Area A, which is the voting district around it. There's about 7,000-8,000 people there. We're going to get to the bridge. It's actually the longest freestanding timber frame bridge in Canada. Now we're into Spirit Square and one of the local watering holes. I kind of want to show you their specialty. It's called a shaft. I'm tasting a Kahlua coffee substance. Have one of these before your run tomorrow and you'll be good. Thanks, guys. It was great having you in my hometown. Thank you very much for having us. See you later. You've got a wild card for the event. Are you looking forward to it? I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be fun. I actually have never ridden kicking horse. It's a different face for my style of riding. I have more jumps and that kind of stuff. This is a lot of really big, high speed, a lot of downhill takeoffs and stuff like that. It's going to be really different. I think I picked a simple enough line that I can get through it and maybe do some tricks. I'm excited for that. Have you been chatting to Logan? Getting any tips? Yeah, me and Logan Payota had a wonderful breakfast. He's already won this event. He's been a wild card in this event. He's got some knowledge for such a young guy. I'll be looking forward to seeing you ride. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. Good luck. I want to do well. That's what's nerve-wracking. I want to win, so obviously I'm going to try and do something that's pushing my limits. Which is also scary for my own health because I don't want to get hurt. Beautiful weather. It's quite cold. You got your line figured? I do. For the most part. I think so. I'm pretty certain on it now. It's quite different up here to where we were in Japan. Where in Japan you could see down the face and you could see people riding here. It's just blind. You don't know who's done what, how the snow is, what landings go. It's intense. So much respect for these guys. So you came in hot at the top. Fast and aggressive. That huge three. Yeah. Big three off the cornice at the top. Came straight into my second air. Was going pretty fast again. Had to clear over a wind roll. And then that's when it all went wrong. Gave the people a scare. Kind of just got jetted back seat. Ended up going backwards over the low angle rock. Thankful to be walking away from that one. You said you wanted to win and you can't win without consequence. For sure. Gave it my all, buddy. There goes Elizabeth. Craig McMorris. This is his first start on the Freeride World Tour. He is a freestyle legend. What? Craig McMorris hunting a flip off that cornice. Two absolute bolts there. That was so clean. How are you feeling after that then? I'm not like a big line snowboarder. I like to do tricks and stuff like that. 360s, 540s, backwards, whatever. So I was trying to figure out where I could do that. I think I was thinking about that too much and it just made me go way too slow. I wanted to find takeoffs that I could actually do tricks on. And when you do that you're not ripping and just doing big errors. You're sick though, man. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Coming in third place, it's Elizabeth Jansen. India. If you like what you see and you want to see more from the world of Red Bull Snow, click the link and subscribe.