There can be many nuances to ski, snowboard, and skateboard tricks that are lost on the average viewer. Was that a mute grab or an indy grab? What’s the difference? Which one is harder? Most of us will never know. Pure rotation, however, is easy to grasp. That's why during this year’s Winter X Games in Aspen this past January, everybody lost their minds when Japanese 19-year-old Hiroto Ogiwara pulled off the world’s first 2340 on his snowboard.
No need to open your calculator app: a 2340 is 6.5 spins, in the air, before deftly landing on a single edge of the snowboard and riding away. Remember when Tony Hawk landed the first 900 on his skateboard and everybody thought it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen? That was two-and-a-half spins.
That was Ogiwara’s first run in the Big Air finals, and unsurprisingly it was enough to earn him the win. But he had already made history before that jump: He made it into the finals off the back of the X Games’ first 2160. Others at the competition got in on the record-breaking, too. At the Big Air ski event the next night, Italian Miro Tabanelli became the first person to land a 2340 on skis, which required landing backward.
The first time a 1980 was landed in competition was three years ago, when Finnish snowboarder Rene Rinnekangas pulled it off first in the Slopestyle event, and then again in the Big Air at that year's X Games Aspen. While there have been plenty of evolutions on that trick (alternative grabs, rotation directions, taking off or landing switch), it wasn’t until this year that someone was able to add an extra half-rotation, and then full rotation. It’s worth noting that Oriwara is also the first person to land a 2160 outside of competition, too, when he did so in 2022 at the ripe old age of 16, but it would be three more years before he would land it at X Games.
So, what the hell is going on here? We’ve seen sports take great evolutionary leaps before, but the sheer number of world-firsts at this single competition felt extraordinary. It turns out there were at least a couple of significant factors at play.
For starters, extreme snow sports training has come a long way, with facilities that have massive “dry slopes,” made of a plastic, carpet-like material that roughly mimics the feel of real snow under your skis (though I hear the rug burn is horrible). Dry slopes have actually been around since the 1920s, and used materials like coconut matting, straw, sawdust, dirt, pine needles, brush matting, and extruded plastic tiles in their first few decades of existence. Modern dry slopes now use plastic bristles with rounded tips that are typically continuously misted by sprinklers. That greatly reduces friction and reportedly makes them feel much more like real snow slopes, albeit with a bit more resistance.
These dry slopes can be used to make slopestyle or big air jumps that point toward massive, long, state-of-the art airbags that mimic the landings you might find at the X Games, except they are much softer and more forgiving. That gives these athletes the opportunity to try out some death-defying tricks without having to defy death quite as much. Basically, they can build these maneuvers into their muscle memory in the offseason, so they can try them in the snow once the competition rolls around. Making 6.5 rotations over the span of 2.5 seconds while falling from 65 feet in the air is not something that can be taken lightly, and it requires repeated attempts with a guaranteed safe landing to make such a feat tenable for a human body.
"In the summer, I do airbag training six days a week for five hours,” Ogiwara told me via email. Thirty hours a week is a lot of reps, but that is what’s required to make something so unnatural feel routine.
The other major factor is the jump itself. I spoke to the snow park designer, Charles Beckinsale of Stomping Grounds, who created all the features at X Games Aspen this year, as well as the airbag jump park you see in the video above. He explained that while the jump is still 65 feet from the end of the take-off to the beginning of the landing (i.e., 65 feet is the shortest your jump can possibly be), the style of jump at this year’s competition wasn’t a traditional “step-down,” but rather a “true table” style jump.
A step-down is a jump where the top of the landing is far lower than the lip of the take-off. These jumps are easier to build and require less snow, but because the athletes are rapidly losing altitude, the impact on landing is extremely high. True tables, in contrast, are jumps where the lip of the take-off and the top of the landing are at the same height, and the grade of the take-off and the landing are matched, in this case at a 39-degree angle (steep enough that it would be considered a double-black diamond at most resorts). This gives the athletes more of a parabolic flight, allowing for more time in the air to pull off these colon-cleansing maneuvers, before landing with a bit less impact on their poor little knees.
“So, a 65-foot jump in 2025 hits much different to a 65-foot from a few years back,” Beckinsale told me.
That all makes sense intellectually, but my eyes still don’t believe what I just saw. It’s just too many spins, too fast, too high up. These tricks will only keep progressing, though. The jump at X Games Aspen 2025 wasn’t an anomaly, but an evolution, and I would expect that its attributes will be the gold standard moving forward, until someone like Beckinsale figures out the next evolution. But for now, as long as there is enough snow, budget, and time to make it, I would expect this jump to be copied until it’s further improved.
I don’t know when someone will add another half-rotation and attempt the first 2520. Only a few skiers and boarders have landed a 2160, and only Ogiwara and Tabanelli have landed the 2340. Typically, we’ll see more variations on these jumps in the form of corking them out and whatnot, but at the rate things are evolving, we could just as easily see the first seven-rotation jump thrown within the year. The next major competition is the Freeski Big Air World Cup 2024/25 and Snowboard Big Air World Cup 2024/25 in Tignes, France, from March 11-14, 2025, followed by another at Engadin-St. Moritz later that month, so we may find out sooner rather than later.
All I know for sure is that if I spun that fast, I would expel every fluid from my body, my toenails would shoot off my feet, and I would land headfirst in the snow like a javelin and die. But congratulations to Hiroto Ogiwara and Miro Tabanelli for being the first to pull it off.
