Just in case you didn't know, the French resort of Avoriaz, in Les Portes du Soleil, is pro snowboarder Eddie Wall’s favourite resort in Europe. So when the guys at SMK Camps and Bond Snowboarding approached Eddie and told him that they wanted to organize a high impact event during the week of SMK Camps' The Super Camp II (an international macro snowboard camp held annually in this resort), he was stoked at the idea. He then proposed to organize a European replica of the The Eddie Wall Ride Invitational held in Mammoth (USA) together with the well known WCI (West Coast Invitational). Thus THE EDDIE “WALL” RIDE EURO INVITATIONAL (a slopestyle contest, conceived and managed by Eddie Wall himself, in which the most outstanding feature is, emmmm, a wall ride) was born. They also thought it would be a great idea if the winner of the contest got a full paid trip to Mammoth to take part in the original contest. And so it went!
So last Easter, Eddie Wall flew together with his fellow friend and snowboarding legend Peter Line and Videohypershred's cameraman Craig Weaver to Avoriaz all the way from Los Angeles, California just for the occasion. During the week, they took part in some of the weekly activities of The Super Camp II together with SMK Camps' more than 300 campers (who were pretty amazed at their presence) and there even was an Eddie Wall Freestyle Master Class (and a lot of partying too, we must say).
Finally, the contest was held on a very sunny Thursday 19th April. The course prepared for the comp by the people of Avoriaz in the Arare area consisted of a 35/40 foot jump, a flat down box, a straight thick tube rail, a volcano pyramid with a big bonk on the top of it, a hip and, obviously, a wall ride in the end. Amongst the 30 participants in the contest were snowboarders like David Livet, Tonton Holland, David Lambert and a great bunch of kids from the Advita international team and Spain's Bond snowboarding team and Avoriaz locals such as Andreas Mancini. Even Eddie Wall himself and Peter Line took part just for the fun of it.
The most important thing for Eddie was that people had a fun riding day and so it was: a sick expression session where we saw Tonton Holland (Volcom/SMK Camps), first place, pull the biggest, cleanest tricks: bs rodeo 5's, miller flips, several inverts on the wall ride, impeccable switch frontsides on the rails and boxes and huge airs on the hip. Swiss snowboarder David Lambert (Bond Switzerland) and Argentinean Jose Cruz won second and third place respectively.
