At 12:25 on January 5, 2015, as 41-year-old Wang Wei skied past the giant Red Bull can obstacle, the qualifiers of the 13th Red Bull Nanshan Open, which featured 49 participants, came to a close. At the Mellow Park in Beijing Nanshan Ski Resort, 26-year-old Wang Long led six other athletes to qualify for the finals. A week later, they will compete with 25 world-class athletes for the championship title of Asia’s highest-level snowboard slopestyle competition in 2015.
Snowboarding blends American street culture and a spirit of adventure, and the qualifiers of this year's Red Bull Nanshan Open also served as a fun showcase for the athletes. That afternoon, as China’s national men’s football team played its first match in the Asian Cup against Saudi Arabia, the Nanshan venue specially arranged a “snowboard penalty kick” segment, where each athlete had to perform a soccer-style kick with their snowboard upon completing their run and crossing the finish line. According to organizers, this activity was unrelated to scores—whether or not the athletes scored did not affect their final results.
Compared to previous editions of the Red Bull Nanshan Open, the qualifier course this year featured a 3-meter-high, 4-meter-wide, 15-ton ice wall at the end of the track. This unique obstacle, called the Ice Wall Ride, was not only the first-ever ice prop introduced in the history of the Red Bull Nanshan Open, but also marked the first time a “fusion of snow and ice” scene was created at a domestic snowboarding competition. This design added diversity to the event, and athletes took advantage of the prop to pull off a variety of innovative moves.
It is reported that four athletes born after the year 2000 participated in this year’s Red Bull Nanshan Open qualifiers, with the youngest being just ten-year-old Su Yiming. In the widely released 3D blockbuster film "The Taking of Tiger Mountain," he played the role of Xiao Shuanzi, who skis on simple twin-tip boards and leads a unit of PLA soldiers through snowy forests. During the qualifier that day, “Xiao Shuanzi” performed a Backside 720 (a 720-degree inward rotation), drawing an exclamatory reaction from Steve, known as the “godfather of Chinese snowboarding.”