The 7th Annual Banked Shalom

(Pictures and Results in the bottom of the article)

Little did Kristoffer Lerånd know 7 years ago, that his innocent turns in the summer snow would bound The Mushroom Crew to a decade of creating this weird event. But as the Crown of Infinite Speed was forged deep within the Mountains of western Norway, so was the curse of the Banked Shalom. All jokes aside, there was almost no snow this year. However, any optimism of some can do wonders.
A small crew decided that we would make the event despite the conditions and headed over to Stryn Sommerski some days prior. The conditions were challenging to say the least. This did reduce the creativeness of the course, making it more Slalom instead of Shalom.

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We built the course in half a day, kudos to all helpers! As usual no one got to test it so we had no idea if it would work or not. By the time we got down, 120 people had pre-registered which was way more than anticipated. So on the contest day we went up super early to be ready on time and we waited for the first contestants to get their BIB number. And we waited, and waited…. by 11:11, when the riders meeting was set to take place we had handed out 4 BIBs in total. It was looking quite dark, but snowboarders are snowboarders, and suddenly some 100 pluss people arrived about 20 minutes late. In retrospect, it is possible that this is due to our incredible skill of communication. No one will ever know.

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The stoke was miles high as Terje Haakonsen sat the first track on his practice run. The course seemed to work really well with a speedy top section, through a challenging left turn in berm nr 5 followed by a tight and technical bottom section. The riders started to question their guessed times as people were flying down the hill. Everyone got 1 practice run each and then things started to get serious.

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Riders came from all over to compete for various prices that they did not know existed. The competition was intense between the top riders going for the fastest runs, Alek Østreng, Ståle Sandbech and Torgeir Bergreim were in doubt that they could beat Terje. And then out of the blue, Len Jørgensen drops the mic and sends a super fast run. The girls where sending it as well, some a little bit too much on the first run but manage to hold the edge on their 2nd run. Silja Sundsfjord and Stine Tønnessen was looking real solid. However, in Banked Shalom tradition, the best prices are hardly ever rewarded to the fastest run. But rather the most average or something more random.

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After a long day of speeding down the course, one could say that even though we had some minor technical difficulties (what a surprise!), it was a successful event. Even with so many riders and a very delayed start we managed to squeeze in 2 runs pluss 1 extra optional switch run. All this and actually almost having the price ceremony at the pre-announced time.

Results: