LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — Justin Reiter is a rarity in snowboarding. He is an American who made his career carving curves into the snow banks at high speeds, instead of launching his board airborne from the halfpipe.
Now Reiter, 45, is a coach of the world’s best woman snowboard racer, Czech two-time gold medalist Ester Ledecka. Reiter’s pupil, can make snowboarding history with a third straight Olympic gold when she races in parallel giant slalom Sunday at the Milan Cortina Games.
But the Olympic future of their prized sport, called PGS for short, is in jeopardy.
Olympics officials have put PGS, an Olympic discipline since 1998, under review with the possibility of dropping it, along with Nordic combined, from the 2030 Winter Games in France. They will review the sports after evaluating how they fare this year. Snowboard’s other racing event, the four-against-four, racetrack style snowboardcross, is not under threat.
The International Olympic Committee said in September that the decision was made in line with new criteria established two years ago for an Olympics that is “balanced, youth-focused and cost-efficient.”
For Reiter, if those are the criteria, it’s a no-brainer.
“I think that would be a huge mistake on the part of the IOC” to drop PGS, Reiter told a small group of reporters on Friday.
“It has a fantastic participation between both men and women. It’s extremely cost effective and requires very little snow. So as the IOC places this importance on equity, climate change, and cost for reusable venues, it checks each of those (boxes) absolutely perfect.”
Ledecka joined with other Alpine snowboarders in a public campaign, labeled #keepPGSolympic.
Ledecka made herself this discipline’s biggest name in 2018 when she followed up an upset win in skiing’s super-G with a victory in PGS, a never-before-done Olympic double that, to that point, was thought impossible.
Forced this year, due to a scheduling conflict, to choose between PGS and what is now her best skiing event, the women’s downhill, she picked snowboarding.
“I would do it again because it is an amazing sport which for sure belongs to the Olympics,” she said in a video on Instagram. “I know my personal opinion doesn’t matter at all, but I just hope that the opinion of the person that does matter will fight for alpine snowboarding.”
International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) is also pulling for the racers, with its sport and event director Sandra Spitz calling PGS “the quintessence of what riding a snowboard is about.”
“It’s exciting, simple to understand, cost-efficient, and takes very little in the way of preparation,” she said.
PGS has had its memorable Olympic moments.
In 2002, Chris Klug of Aspen, Colorado, captured a bronze medal in front of a rapturous American crowd in Park City, Utah — the emotional culmination of a comeback from a liver transplant less than two years earlier.
In 2014 came another magical moment when Vic Wild — an American-born snowboard racer who moved to Russia to get better training and funding for a PGS dream that was dead in the States — won a gold medal on the same day his Russian wife won bronze.
Four years later came Ledecka, giving the world a reason to tune in to PGS to see if she could complete her historic double. She did.
Not all the moments have been great. PGS was contested in a driving rainstorm at the 2010 Vancouver Games. Riders needed umbrellas to shield themselves while riding up the lift. More than a dozen slid off the course in the women’s contest on a day bronze medalist Marion Kreiner of Austria described as “like jumping into a swimming pool.”
Reiter defends his sport, where two racers compete side-by-side speeding through gates for the fastest finish, as key to snowboarding. For him, it simply represents what most people do on a snowboard. Only once they learn to ride, and maybe ride fast, do a minority decide to risk their necks on the “features” by jumping in a halfpipe or flying over huge rollers and ramps.
Another key truth is that America’s TV network, NBC, pays a big chunk of the bill for the Olympics, and snowboard racing lacks American star power. Besides Klug’s, the United States has only won one other medal, a bronze, in PGS.
Reiter also mentioned a shift in snowboard manufacturers’ focus on making boards for jumping, not speed.
“And snowboarding is just kind of the redheaded stepchild of the Olympics despite the fact that they absolutely need snowboarding,” he said, in a nod to the boost the sport gave the Olympic movement when it was added in 1998.
In the end, PGS riders are a small band of underappreciated purists with one last chance to make a stand. Putting on a good show Sunday would certainly help with that. The reality, though, is that once PGS packs up, snowboarding moves to the halfpipe, which has stars like Chloe Kim, Scotty James and Ayumu Hirano ready to put on a show.
“It’s great to be here in Livigno where everyone can see what everyone else is doing and go out and watch the big air” and other high-flying events, Reiter said. “And I hope to see some guys watching the race finals and sharing the energy that is snowboarding.”
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AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this report.
