The Otago Uni Snow Sports Club (OUSSC) “brought the energy” at the annual CUBA JIB in Christchurch on Wednesday, July 24th. The Red Bull-sponsored Re-Ori event is a ski and snowboarding competition run by the Canterbury Uni Boardriders Association, held right on campus. They welcomed around 50 competitors this year to dazzle the thousand-strong crowd, performing tricks off a jump constructed from imported snow and scaffolding. Otago competitors Jess Moffett and Peter Barclay took out first and second respectively for the female and male ski categories.
Critic Te Ārohi spoke to OUSSC Prez Peter for a rundown of the event. He said that they were invited by their mates in CUBA to compete in the competition (“they wanted some of that Otago student energy”) with Red Bull kindly offering to sponsor a van full of members to compete for free. “I think about half of us who went up ended up competing in the actual event and the rest just brought the energy, I suppose,” Peter laughed. “It was really epic to have some Otago skiers in the mix.”
Red Bull-sponsored Winter Olympic athletes Nico Porteous and Cool Wakushima were in the mix as well, bringing stars to the eyes of student competitors. Peter recalled having watched Nico compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics, only to be lined up next to him two years later waiting their respective turns at CUBA JIB. “Having him there was really sick [...] Almost like a meet your hero sort of thing, but I wouldn’t dare admit that he’s my hero because we were competing next to each other,” he said.
Peter, prepped and ready with a beer and a dart, alongside Otago brethren Ben and Jess made it through their heats where they did three jumps each. Ben – who’d originally joined for the interview, but left to take a nap after a big weekend on the Cardrona slopes – apparently hit the rail in his heat so hard it dislodged from the makeshift ski jump. It took them half an hour to repair, Peter recalled with a laugh.
Jess did a Lincoln Loop – “which is like a cartwheel side slip, and then a backflip” – landing each jump to the roar of the crowd, scoring her the win. It was the first time she’d attempted the trick. Her brother is President of CUBA, and suggested she try the move when she asked him what she should do. “She said, ‘Alright,’ and then did it,” said Peter. Mad moves.
To score his silver medal (saying “World’s Best Dad”), Peter did a cork five and a cork seven. At Critic’s confusion, he explained that the number reflects the amount of degrees of rotation that you’ve done, and the cork is spinning off the axis. “So for a 540 you go off the jump facing forward and you do one and a half full rotations and land going backwards,” he said. “I was the only person who made it round to seven – like two full rotations – the whole night ‘cos [the jump] was teensy weensy.”
Describing the experience of landing his winning jump to a crowd of hundreds of students, his little brother among them, Peter said, “Oh, it was so cool. I think it's like one of the coolest experiences I've ever had in my entire life [...] Yeah, it was kind of nuts. I'll probably never experience anything like that again.” In a message to Critic Te Ārohi, Jess echoed the level of stoke: “Was wicked fun! The heart palpitations from all the Red Bulls could’ve been mistaken by sheer adrenaline, kudos to the hype of the crowd. Just proud of the OUSSC mana.”
Asked if he thought Otago would ever host something similar, Peter said they’d all immediately started talking about it afterwards, theorising a Union Lawn jump. But on second-thought, he said, “Quite frankly, I think it’s kind of cool that it just happens there. Like, if every university in the country did its own little ski competition on top of scaffolding, it would kind of lose why it’s so special doing it in Canterbury. I think it'd be really cool in future years to have more Otago students go and compete or just attend.”
OUSA Prez Keegan, who was in the crowd on the day, didn’t seem optimistic about Otago’s chances of seeing a similar event, either. While Keegan said, “I WOULD LOVE TO” when Critic asked if OUSA would consider it, she added, “but also I’ll copy UCSA when hell freezes over. If we did something similar it would be 10x better becuase [sic] we are 10x better.” She added that “it was so sick being at [JIB] though – really cool to see an event that’s so different from what people might see as a student event."