Photos by Phil Erickson courtesy of Burton

Right now down in New Zealand, where it's already mid-day tomorrow, the Burton Global Open Series (BGOS) is kicking off at Cardrona Resort outside of Wanaka. The BGOS is pretty much as big a deal as it gets in Snowboarding competition (well, ok besides the Winter X Games and the Olympics). Here's why.

First of the year
Not only is this the first stop in the five stop Burton Global Open Series, but its officially the first competition of the year in Snowboarding.

$100,000 on the line
At the end of the five competitions Burton hands out TWO $100,000 dollar checks. One to the overall women. One to the overall man. (Overall means both halfpipe and slopestyle, which they have at all five stops)

A whole lotta other money
They hand out a butt-load of cash at each of the competitions. The purse varies from stop to stop, but its usually enough incentive to draw in the best of the best.

Pressure's off
The Burton Global Open Series doesn't official earn the riders a spot into the Olympics this February (that would be the Grand Prix series, more on that later) so the riders can "let their hair down" so-to-speak.

Pressure's on
The riders can earn points towards TTR (Ticket to Ride) the most noted ranking system within snowboarding. It's a big honor (and some big money) to win the overall title each season on the TTR tour. The majority of competitions in snowboarding are given a "Star" status depending on how big a deal the competition is. (5 Star, 4 Star, 3 Star, etc.) The higher the TTR Star status, the higher the points earned for placing well.

Each stop of the BGOS is a 6 Star event including this one in New Zealand, so yeah... its kinda a big deal.

The Darkhorse
By definition of the contest being an "open", anybody and their sister can sister can sign up for it. So that means a lot of riders who you and I have never heard of have a chance of getting some exposure by good-'ol-fashioned hard work and standout riding. It's how a lot of the pro's you know of now have made their mark.

It takes a couple days of eliminations to whittle it down, but it's always exciting to see the Finals line-up in each event. You'll have two or three no-names standing at the top of the pipe with riders like Shaun White and Danny Kass- (talk about pressure)

Never before seen tricks?
The newest fad in snowboarding is a trick called a "double-cork". Lucky for you, double corks are about as cool to watch as a huge backflip gainer- but much harder to execute, so riders will actually score uber-points with the judges. (Big ol' gainer backflips are neat to watch but don't score high with judges b/c they are actually easier than flat-spins to perform.)

It is quite possible that we may seen some never-before-done-in-competition tricks at the New Zealand Open since the top guys have been training for months trying to gain the advantage with their own versions of the double-cork. Shaun White is said to have a halfpipe run with four double-corks in a row. Louie Vito, Luke Mitrani, Danny Kass are all pre-qualified for semi-finals and they are all rumored to have a double cork. There are others too.

On the other hand... if none of the riders who "have a double-cork" in their bag of tricks decide to step-it up and throw one down, raising the standard, than we may not see the phenomena this week in New Zealand. These riders may collectively choose to save these harder tricks for competitions that will qualify them for the Olympics.

It's hot here and it's not there
Get your snow fix. Its the middle of winter in New Zealand. After this, we're not going to see much action on the snowboard competition side of things until November... which is still 3 months away.



Check back for updates, photos and results from the New Zealand Burton Open. Other sweet sites to check out are www.opensnowboarding.com and www.ttrworldtour.com