Europe’s young guns dominated the fifth anniversary of the White Style (presented by Kona) winter slopestyle competition in Leogang last Friday evening.

Riders from North America made into the top ten: Darren Berrecloth came fifth, Cam McCaul sixth and Jamie Goldman seventh. Great Britain’s other well-known faces, Sam Reynolds and Grant Fielder, placed eighth and ninth.

More than 2,000 spectators made their way to the White Style course designed and built by Kona Clump team rider Grant “Chopper” Fielder. Grant received lots of positive feedback from the other riders for the set up consisting of different elements like.

The most important point to remember: the whole course was built out of snow. So it was definitely a challenging setup. But some of the world’s best riders came to Leogang. They impressed the spectators and sometimes each other by pulling off the biggest tricks that were seen in a mountain bike contest.

The qualifications on Friday evening were dominated by Swedish rider Martin Soederstroem (technical and clean riding including double tail whips), Yannick Granieri from France (by far the biggest back flips performed in a contest), Cam McCaul (great style and big bag of tricks), Canadian Darren “The Claw” Berrecloth (360 look downs at its best). Linus Sjoeholm (SWE), Amir Kabbani (GER), Sam Pilgrim (GBR) and Jamie Goldman (USA) completed the top eight of the qualifying.

Martin Soederstroem, who won the qualifications, couldn’t finish his first run because of a technical issue. Then he crashed hard on his second final run trying to pull a double tailwhip because he overshot the 40ft gap and landed too far down – 11th place for him. Cam McCaul, Darren Berrecloth and Amir Kabbani showed clean runs including back flip tail whips, superseaters, opposite 360s, 360 x-ups and back flips. But it was France, Sweden and Great Britain to dominate the podium.

Linus Sjoeholm, Martin Soederstroem’s best riding buddy, was the big surprise of the contest. His clean execution and range of technical tricks impressed the judges and spectators: 360 at the starting drop, double tailwhip at the first double, superman at the second jump, back flip off the fruit bowl, barspin into the 2nd fruit bowl, tail whipping the big drop and finishing his run with a flip whip at the last double. Linus’ second place and 1,000 Euros were well deserved!

The man of the day though was Sam Pilgrim: tailwhip at the start, front flip at the first double, back flip no hander at the second, 360 x-up out of the fruit bowl, tuck no-hander and back flip at the 2nd fruit bowl, as well as a back flip table at the last jump.

Sam couldn’t stop joking after his success having 1,800 Euros in his pocket: “I will spend all the money for sweets, for real!” But he also stated: “Crashing on snow is not that funny, because it’s much harder than you might think. It took me a bit to cope with it when I competed the first time at the White Style, but man, it was fun this year and Chopper did a really great job, big respect!”

A highlight clip featuring the best of the action and the three winning runs will be available on www.watch26.tv very soon.