Freestyle skiing is a sport subset of the larger skiing which involves doing stuff that normal people wouldn't do on a normal slope.
I'll focus on the following discliplines:
Half Pipe: skied in the same feature of the Snowboard Halfpipe, the skier jumps off the sides of this cut pipe shape, landing back in and moving to jump off the other side, repeating one side after the other.
Big Air: it's big and in the air, it's all about one single jump and the best trick a skier can do with that jump.
Slopestyle: it's a sloped course where jumps and metal obstacles called rails and boxes, alternates. The goal is to ski the track executing tricks at each feature.
The scoring for three disciplines is centered on how difficult are the tricks, how flawless are they execute and how big those tricks. The FIS, International Ski and Snowboard Federation, standardized the scoring on a 0 to 100 value with a defined set of characteristics for each discipline but other events, like the Winter X-Games, have their own scoring systems that not always align with FIS standards. In every cases, it is in the hands of human judges and human fallability to give an evaluation, as there hadn't been a standardization effort like in figure skating where computers prepare base scores which judges can tweak.
All three disciplines are Olympic sports, with both women and man competing. Big air was introduced in the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, while Slopestyle and Half pipe first appeared at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia.
Aerials, Moguls and Skicross are also considered part of the Freestyle skiing but I choose to not touch them as I don't know them as much as the above three.
Records:
- Highest jump from a quarter pipe: the Simon Dumont record is one that remained in the eyes of everyone who watched the freestyle skiing film Claim in 2008 when he reached more than 10 meters in the air.
- Longest metal rail: in 2022, Swedish Jesper Tjäder managed in a feat of equilibrium to grind a rail of just about 154.49 meter, after an hundred or so attempts that is.
- Bobby Brown is the only skier gaining a perfect score at X-Games with two tricks (switch double Misty mute 1260 and switch double Misty mute 1440) that were the first to be landed during a competition. It happened in 2010.
Cursiosities:
- The cubed half pipe: yes, an half pipe made of cubes, or better, an half pipe cut down in cubes. That's where Simon Dumon shoot another iconic segment with Red Bull.
- You can do freestyle slopestyle and big air in summer as well: there are slopes that use special plastics aided by water to simulate some slopestyle and big air features.
- The sport became an extremely specialized one: who does half pipe is never seen doing big air and slopestyle and viceversa. But it wasn't always like that: in the early 2000s up to 2015s people like Simon Dumon and Jon Olsson competed and won in all three disciplines. The only exception is the Chinese American Eileen Gu which is able to win in all 3 disciplines.
- X-Games is the most famous event in the sport.
- The sport game STEEP features all three disciplines, with plenty of features and parks scattered around the maps. The Olympics DLC let you participate in Slopestyle skiing and half pipe olympic events set at Pyeongchang Winter Olympics of 2018, while the X-Games DLC brings you to the Winter X-Games event.
You can easily find videos of the Quarter pipe and rail record, as well as the cube pipe on Youtube. I didn't include them as the bounty threw up otherwise.
