After 15 successful years in Zurich, the guys responsible for Freestyle.CH decided to put on not one but two action sports extravaganzas for 2009. In addition to the well-known one that went down at the end of September, they brought the love to Berlin too.

For the first time, snowboarders and other extreme sports athletes we’re flying through the air former airport Berlin Tempelhof this year.
With less than perfect conditions, the qualification rounds went down on Friday and Saturday. 8 riders bagged tickets for the finals on Sunday, amongst them newcomers like Werni Stock, Colin Frei and Marco Grilc. But in the end, neither them nor shred veteran Stefan Gimpl, who had won the freestyle.ch last year, could stand against the super strong qualifiers from Friday Seb Toutant, Eero Ettala, Peetu Piiroinen and Iouri ‘I-Pod’ Podlatchikov, who had already dominated the final rounds of freestyle.ch 09 two weeks before. Ettala had bagged the snowboard champ title at the Landiwiese this year, I-Pod had convinced the crowd as crossover champ and also Piiroinen and Toutant had made good points with the judges there.

And just like in Zürich, it were again the snowboarders who impressed the crowd most with their tricks, and so next to FMXer Mat Rebeaud and skater Sandro Dias, Seb Toutant and Elias Elhardt made it to the Crossover Superfinals. After a tough fight and a really bad slam by Toutant it was Elhardt, who earned the loudest cheers for his BS 10 Double Cork and was crowned first ever freestyle.berlin crossover champ.
The weather finally got little better for the finals and superfinals on Sunday and the athletes were only battling each other and not the rain anymore. Piironinen had been riding solidly all weekend, after scoring 1st place in the qualification he easily marched through to the super finals, stomping 9s, 10s, corks and double corks almost completely flawless. Biggest surprises of the weekend were probably newcomers Marco Grilc from Slovenia and Werni Stock from Austria. Grilc show super clean tricks from an incredibly versatile bag of different tricks and only lost his chance for the super finals in the last second against I-Pod, who managed to stick a one foot straight air benihana in his very last run after slamming in the in run at the first try.

The fireworks of spins, corks and rodeos that Piiroinen, Toutant, Ettala and I-Pod showed in the superfinals might have gotten a couple of people with solid hangovers from the party the previous night a bit sick in the head. In the end it was the 17 years old Canadian Toutant, who stomped his BS 10 Double Cork and BS 12 Cork just a tiny bit cleaner than Finn Ettala and although some critical observers were complaining that there wasn’t much variation in his trick repertoire, he did pull off some of the most complicated tricks there are in snowboarding so flawless, that he deserved to exchange places with Eero this time in front of Piiroinen, who got third.

October 13th, 2009
onboardsnowboarding.com

Freestyle.Berlin Freeski Finals

The incomparable Henrik Harlaut took home another major win today today at the inaugural Freestyle.Berlin in Germany.

Henrik topped the field with a flawless and stylish double cork 1260, edging out Freestyle.ch champion Sammy Carlson, who placed second, 2009 X Games slopestyle gold medalist TJ Schiller, who placed third, and Jacob Wester, who was attempting some of the first ever double cork 1440's and landed in fourth for his efforts.

With two of the five major pre-season stadium big airs in the books, we now look ahead to the highly anticipated London Freeze on October 31st, the recently announced Barcelona Snow Show on November 7th, and the always exciting Stockholm Winter Jam (aka King of Style) on November 21st.

Results
1) Henrik Harlaut
2) Sammy Carlson
3) TJ Schiller
4) Jacob Wester
5) Andreas Håtveit
6) Jon Olsson
7) Bobby Brown
8) Elias Ambühl
9) Fridtjof Fredricsson
10) Nicolas Vuignier
11) Thomas Hlawitschka
12) Russ Henshaw
13) Jossi Wells
14) Andri Ambühl
15) Martin Misof
16) Colby West
17) Benedikt Mayr
18) Richard Permin
19) Simon Dumont
20) Oscar Scherlin

newschoolers.com
October 11th 2009

Seb Toutant wins Freestyle.Berlin Big Air Contest

Seb Toutant wins Freestyle.Berlin
Sebastien Toutant, the French Candian who has been working wonders on the competition circuit this season, has took another major title over the weekend at the Ferestyle.Berlin big air comp.

Seb Toots, as he is known, stomped his signature Tootsie roll so clean you’d have thought it was a simple front three, rather than a backside ten double-cork.

Toutant, who is still only 17-years-old, managed to hold back the more-experienced likes of Eero Ettala, Iouri Podlatchikov and Peetu Piiroinen in the Super-final, which took place on a massive scaffold kicker in front of Berlin’s historic Templehof Airport.

Peetu, who had qualified in first place on the Friday and won Saturday’s “final”, was beaten into third on the Sunday by Eero Ettala, who won the Swiss leg of the competition a couple of weeks ago.

Meanwhile, local boy Elias Elhardt took the title in the crossover section of the competition, beating skaters and skiers by garnering the biggest reaction from the mostly-German crowd.

whitelines.com

Elias Elhardt wins Freestyle.Berlin Crossover Contest

Elias Elhardt has hit us up to talk about winning the Crossover Contest at Freestyle.Berlin, the German leg of the prestigious Freestyle.ch comp.

Elhardt, who is German himself, took the prize after wowing the crowd with a stylish backflip and an impressive backside 1080 double-cork. This put him in first place ahead of the skateboarders, free-skiers and freestyle motorcross riders who were also gunning for the title.

Here’s Elias telling it how it is: “At the moment I’m sitting in the Hotel lobby in Berlin and I’m pretty tired and hangover from two awesome parties. Yes, this weekend has been super good and thinking back to all the impressions and happenings at the Freestyle.Berlin just puts a smile on my face. To ride a contest in my homeland Germany was pretty special for me and I liked the fact that snowboarding was brought to people who would normally never see it.

On Saturday was the qualification day for me. In the training everything went perfect and I landed all my tricks. I felt good on the board and was pretty confident for the contest. When the contest was finally on, I wasn’t able to handle the mind game and couldn’t put my tricks down. In don’t really know why, but I somehow lost my concentration on what I was doing…Anyways, after that missed qualification I thought that it might just not be my day, so I started looking forward to the pirates Premiere that night. For a moment I really forgot that there was still some more riding to come. The Crossover session. The Contest, where riders from all four disciplines (snowboarding, skateboarding, freeskiing and FMX) compete to become the overall winner and take it home for their sport. The crowd decides.

Without any expectations it went well for me and I ended up in the super Finals. As the crowed was in charge of deciding who would go through I just went for a simple backflip, which was so much fun doing, and it worked out. In the Super finals I did the bs 1080 double cork. I was pretty happy about it and the crowd seemed to be stoked too, because they somehow cheered loud enough to make me the “Crossover Champ”. I was also really surprised to get the award for the “most stylish trick” of the event for that backflip. I honestly really don’t know why, as there was like hundreds of more stylish tricks going down that Weekend. They probably just had a prize left and I was next to the stage at the prize giving ;-).

Anyways, I was stoked to win a pretty open flight ticket from Air Berlin for two. From that Moment on, it was just party time full on. That night I slept something like two hours and on the next day we had an amazing party again. All the riders where really stoked on the whole event and partied like there was no tomorrow. Now I’m going to stay for some more days in Berlin to check out the city…I’m looking forward to that, as I think it’s such a interesting city with all it’s history, art and night life…”

whitelines.com