I’m watching right now, and there’s this downhill skiing event going on, but with a series of ramps and rails. The skiers hop onto the the rails with their skis turned sideways and ride them like teenage skateboarders riding stair rails.
It’s been awhile since I paid much attention to the Olympics of either season. Has this event been an Olympic thing for very long? What’s it called? It seems like a weird mishmash of downhill skiing and skateboard stunting.
ETA: freestyle skiing, I now see it’s called.
ETA2: Ok, now that I learned the name, I just googled it. It’s been a thing for 34 years?? Damn, I’m out of touch.
I suspect the actual event solost saw was the Slopestyle competition, which was added to the Olympics in 2014. So this is only the 4th Olympics with this event.
The Freestyle skiing events in the Olympics and the years they were introduced:
I worked with a guy in 1993-4 that had been active in what would become the US Olympics Freestyle Ski team before I met him. He certainly had some cool moves he could do on foot & small platforms, spins and twirls, and he’d hold weights and poles when he could (the boss wasn’t looking) to enhance turns. Your feet need to mostly stay together in Freestyle so the movements are limited in interesting ways.
One of the first types of freestyle skiing was ski ballet which may be what you’re thinking of. It essentially ended as a competitive sport around 2000 when the committees focused on aerials and moguls, and later added the other events.