The spotlight reel of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics was outlined by excessive methods—corkscrews, twists, and flips carried out by snowboarders and freestyle skiers.
These aerial feats are complicated, however in lots of circumstances, they are often traced again to a easy device: hours spent spinning and flopping into oversize plastic luggage.
During the last 20 years, a handful of producers—reminiscent of Bagjump, Development Airbags, and BigAirBag—have perfected the artwork of constructing huge plastic touchdown pads, superb for aspiring excessive sports activities athletes to push the boundaries of their abilities and take a look at out new methods year-round. Starting with the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, athletes like Shaun White, Kevin Pearce, Danny Davis, and Sage Kotsenburg started making in depth use of this type of coaching, just like the way in which gymnasts would use foam pits.
“The intense ranges the sports activities are being carried out at are a lot safer attributable to Bagjump coaching,” says Martin Rasinger, a former professional snowboarder and the inventor of the system.
Websites which have these methods, comparatively few and much between, have develop into locations for superior coaching. Wy’East Mountain Academy, an excessive sports-focused secondary college in Sandy, Oregon, put in a $4 million bag on its slopes final 12 months that’s open year-round. The 80-by-200-foot airbag, contoured to the curve of the mountain and put in utilizing snowcat autos, is the biggest in North America, and one thing that’s comparatively uncommon within the U.S. Smaller variations might be discovered on the U.S. Ski & Snowboard headquarters in Park Metropolis, Utah, and quickly on California’s Mammoth Mountain.
Troy Podmilsak, a U.S. freestyle ski leap competitor who landed a “Triple 18” in Milan during competition—three off-axis flips mixed with 5 full rotations—skilled on the Wy’East bag before the Games.
Bagjump says there are round 20 places all over the world decked out with their touchdown pads, together with their very own Banger Park facility in Scharnitz, Austria.
“As quickly as these luggage come out, you’re engaged on doing doubles,” says Elijah Teter, athletic director at Wy’East and a former Olympic coach {and professional} snowboarder. “Now you’re seeing triples and even quads.”
Designing a stronger airbag
The historical past of those luggage is a Venn diagram of entrepreneurship, excessive sports activities and, in some circumstances, stunt crews. Earlier than they turned a key a part of coaching, studying superior methods both meant experimenting through the comparatively uncommon days with in depth recent powder—which acted as a pure shock absorber for adventurous athletes—or placing up with the ache of repeated onerous landings. And after a couple of jumps into the powder, the impressions left by skiers and snowboarders meant that trainees wanted to discover a new spot.
Rasinger tells Quick Firm he acquired the thought for an oversize coaching bag after watching the airbag stunt fall through the ending of the 1997 film The Recreation, starring Michael Douglas, too many occasions. He was so impressed, actually, that he flew to Los Angeles, tracked down the stunt crew, and carried out some 30-foot drop exams with a snowboard. He realized that to work for excessive athletes, such a bag would have to be bigger, softer, and far stronger to carry as much as steel snowboard edges.
Rasinger went house to Austria and constructed a take a look at bag in Innsbruck in 2007; a clip of an early jump was posted to YouTube. Ultimately, his firm, Bagjump, would choose a system: a fiberglass construction with a particular PVC coating to resist the pressure and cuts from boards and boarders. The corporate has since offered a couple of thousand such luggage, largely to trampoline parks or gymnastics amenities.
Customers can get the baggage in quite a lot of sizes, for sports activities together with BMX biking and even climbing. Olympic coaching luggage, specifically designed for various snowboarding disciplines reminiscent of halfpipe and slopestyle, vary from 50-by-50 ft to 120-by-230 ft. The stiffness of the baggage might be adjusted to supply extra give when studying a trick, and in addition to really feel extra like snow to imitate an actual touchdown.
“It’s softer and subsequently additionally safer, as a result of it’s impact-absorbing and it doesn’t bounce you away like netting or automobile tires or foam,” Rasinger told ESPN in 2012. “You continue to get a bounce from it. It’s higher than hitting a concrete wall—that’s for positive.”
These luggage and ramp methods even have what’s known as a dry slope in-run, which simulates the sensation—and grip—of snow, giving these making an attempt a trick a way more reasonable feeling throughout a follow session. That means to coach safely and constantly has made them a fixture of elite coaching, and one in all many issues pushing performances ahead at occasions such because the Olympics.
“Bagjump has had a big influence on not simply the security facet, but in addition the way in which the sports activities have progressed over time,” Rasinger says.
