joegm
New member
as usual tony c brings up a good point to ponder in regards to jm's olympic run, prior to the fis rules changes regarding inverts... what i find interesting is to compare the tape from the 98 nagano games and moseley's gold medal run with the triple twister up top and the 360 iron cross on the bottom, which at the time, specifically refering to air, seemed revolutionary. the technical progression in 4 years from 98 to 02 when comparing the tape is quite an interesting study... 02 was still under the no invert rule which was pushed to the edge by moseley with the d roll... my observations of 02 comp was that speed, and the apparent increase in it from 98, was stunning...travis mayer's turns in the 30 bumps after the 1st jump but before the second, were some of the quickest turns i have ever seen... his turns on the bottom 30 bumps came in , when broken down on video, at about 4 and 1/2 turns per second!!!! my buddy gil maintains though, that at a certain point of speed/velocity, the turn quality/dynamic begins to suffer... i agree with this for the most part for most skiers on the top 2/3rds of the run... i think he has a point when watching finland's janne lahtela's 02 comp runs which ended up suffering turn wise because of the speed with which janne tried to ski.... and as they should , turns account for 50% of the mark.. this is what's great about the new rule change regarding inverts... the sport was progressing, in my opinion, in a direction in which the only real progression left was to ski faster... and i think this was apparent in salt lake 02...the part that fascinates me is that i think it is all going to slow down substantially in 06 because of what is apparently going to be an unwritten mandate for an inverted jump.... the classic twister, be it double, triple , quad , or quint ( yeah 5!!! i saw it being worked on at blackcomb 2 summers ago before the rule change ) which, unlike an invert, lends itself to not having to dump speed when entering the jump, is for all intensive purposes all done as an air in comps because of the lesser talked about fis change that disallows more than 2 consecutive executions of the same maneuver ( ie: triple twister )... i think moseley would have won the silver in 02 if he was playing under the new rules...but i still think travis mayer would have won the gold ( rightly so ) it is going to be interesting to see how this progresses this upcoming winter with guys like bloom and pa rousseau, cabral and dawson , coming off the first winter in which inverts were allowed. i think i mentioned before that there was talk this past summer in blackcomb about attempting a switch air... that would really slow it down... maybe too much so!!!!