Europe’s longest established winter snowsports festival, The BRITS, went down last week in Laax with some of the sickest riding and après shenanigans in the event's 20 year history as it celebrated its milestone birthday in style. It was a busy week where record breaking spins were spun, new heights reached, stars of the future found and a plethora of parties as debauched as ever!

Celebrating 20 years of snowsporting history, organisers and sponsors upped the ante to guarantee The BRITS 2009 was an absolute classic! Playing host to the prestigious British Snowboard and Freeski Championships, which witnessed kids, rookies, pros and Olympians, including Lesley McKenna, X Games Gold Medallist Jenny Jones, Ben Kilner, Jaime Nicholls, James Woods and Katie Summerhayes, all throwing down some of the highest standard of riding witnessed at the BRITS to date. The Championship action came courtesy of the Trespass Snowboardcross/Skiercross, Quiksilver Big Air, Animal Slopestyle and SNO!zone Halfpipe. For full daily competition event reports, results and images please check out the www.brits09.com website.

The all-new Après Session Arena with its array of entertainment and fully stocked bar proved unsurprisingly popular and kept the masses entertained after a sunny days shredding on the hill. Running alongside the live DJ and acoustic sets from the likes of hot new prospect Ben Howard, revellers thronged outside the Crap Bar for a raft of extracurricular festivities which included the Nike 6.0 Highest Ollie Challenge, in which Ben Kilner set a new British record of 1 metre (or 39” in old money) which secured him his 2nd of three wins during the week! 2009 also saw the return of the much loved Red Bull Homerun, in which a mix of 210 ‘pumped’ skiers and snowboarders jostled for a space on the front row at the start with all entrants determined to win the highly charged en masse Chinese downhill race.

The Cushe Air Bag was pounded all week long with a never-ending stream of eager freestylers greeted with a reassuringly Cushe landing, while the SUSO drinks team were at the heart of the Après Arena with their unique SUSO Slopeside Cinema to screen the greatest 20 film sections of all time as voted for by the public. Those making the final countdown and reaching the hall of fame were:

Freeski

1. Seth Johnson, “SM3, The Front Line”
2. 2. C R Johnson, “SM3, The Front Line”
3. Simon Dumont, “Claim”
4. Sammy Carlson, “Reasons”

Snowboarding

1. Johan Olofsson, “Totally Board 5”
2. Romain De Marchi, “Vivid”
3. Travis Rice, “Pop”
4. Terje Haakonsen, “New Way of Thinking”

After the Après action and a couple of cold beers to whet the appetite it was then home, wash-down, and back out in time for one of the nightly club sessions, which witnessed the BRITS biggest ever music line-up! Headliners included DJ sets from The Go! Team, Vadim, Micky Finn and Bonobo with live sets from Gentlemen’s Pistols, Kandi Coded, Kovak and Jett Black offering a line-up with something for every musical taste, covering Rock, Hip-Hop, Funk, DnB, Electro Pop and some good old Cheesy 80s classics for the BRITS 20th Birthday Bash, which witnessed some wonderful and frankly weird fancy dress costumes!

If you return from Switzerland in a slight daze, don’t worry as Extreme Channel will be creating a half hour dedicated BRITS show, so you’ll be able to see how you spent the week or you can even get your stay-at-home mates to tune in and see what they missed! Exact timings of the show will be announced on the BRITS website, so keep checking back for more details. We’ve also been posting plenty of pics and podcasts of the action, both on and off the slopes, onto our website, so go check them out at www.britishsnowtour.com/0809/brits/gallery/index.html

And with that, the 20 year anniversary edition of the BRITS is all wrapped up and we look forward to welcoming you out to Laax next year for our 21st. We’ll shortly be posting new info about 2010 packages so stay tuned.

The BRITS, which is part of the Swatch TTR World Snowboard Tour would not have been possible without its highly supportive sponsors: Animal, Trespass, Quiksilver, SNO!zone, Cushe, SUSO, TSA and Ellis Brigham. Demo partners: DC, Ride, K2, Line and Clifbar. Media partners: Whitelines, Skiclub.co.uk, Metrosnow.co.uk, Extreme Sports Channel and Snowboardclub.co.uk. Destination partners: Switzerland Tourism and Laax.

---