The spectrum of Mountainboarding disciplines

Admin on 03/08/2011

Exploring how to define the disciplines of Mountainboarding

A while ago a couple of us started trying to develop a system for defining and categorising the various disciplines of mountainboarding. We started with a list of the four main disciplines:

  • Freeriding
  • Downhill
  • BoarderX
  • Freestyle

But those four didn’t quite cover mountainboarding in all it’s various forms so we sub-divided and added a few more:

  • Freecarve
  • Big Air
  • Slopestyle
  • JibStreet
  • Park

Freecarve, as a discipline, could be defined as ‘Downhill without the competitiveness’, so it covers things like riding firetracks where you want to go as fast as possible but aren’t competing against other riders. And it’s different to Freeride, which isn’t really about speed, but has some of the same philosophy, i.e. not really having any aim, or outcome, or point to it.

Big Air, Slopestyle, Jib, Street and Park are all sub-disciplines of Freestyle.
When then put all those disciplines into a linear spectrum that looked like this:

  • Freeride: Non-competitive riding over a range of terrain, but mostly singletrack in woodland.
  • Freecarve: Non-competitive one-man descents. Medium length course.
  • Downhill: Timed one-man descents. Long courses. High speed.
  • Boardercross: Two to four-man racing on a specifically designed track.
  • Freecross: Four-man racing with freestyle element. Specifically designed track.
  • Slopestyle: Performing medium-sized tricks on a specifically designed course consisting of multiple jumps, rails and other features, and with multiple lines of descent.
  • Jib: Performing small, innovative tricks.
  • Street: Small tricks on urban terrain.
  • Skatepark: Tricks on skatepark features.
  • Big Air: Big tricks on large tabletop(s)

Then, in an attempt to better understand the relationship between the disciplines we plotted them on a graph using Competitiveness, Speed and Style.

Levels of Competitiveness

  • 3. Totally objectively judged by points or times.
  • 2. Rider judged. Subjective mutual consensus agreed upon by small group of peers. May include a degree of objectivity.
  • 1. Self judged. Setting personal goals. Subjective.
  • 0. No judgement.

Levels of Style (where speed does not apply)

  • 3. Big tricks, impressive, crowd-pleasing. front flips, 720’s, etc.
  • 2. Medium tricks, backflips, 360’s, etc.
  • 1. Small tricks, stalls, grinds, 180’s, etc.
  • 0. No style.

Levels Speed (where style does not apply)

  • 2. Speed most important element of the discipline.
  • 1. Speed is one important element of the discipline.
  • 0. Speed not important.

And that’s as far as we got…