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Weird Snow Sports

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The world changes in the snow. Things become colder, slippier, wetter — everything’s more difficult, including the most simple everyday activities like driving and walking around. So, the logical reaction is to break out your favorite extreme sport and get to it, right? Right.

Biking 

Downhill biking is already one of the scariest things in the world. You’re hurtling down a mountain, completely at the mercy of gravity, and there’s really no way  you can stop, because if you break too hard you’ll skid out. That’s scary, and the idea of doing it in the snow is completely mind-bending. Yet, here are a whole bunch of riders not only downhill biking in the snow — they’re also racing each other. Watch as the bikers hit the turns; basically every time the group has to go around a bend, at least 3 or 4 of them wipe out. It’s surprising that any of them stay upright — turning a bike in the snow must be like trying to run on ice. There’s just no way to get any traction or grip. But eventually they transition to a more normal offroad terrain, and a bunch of the riders finish, just going to show that people can do pretty much anything.

Skateboarding 

Skateboarding in the snow is basically urban snowboarding and it’s basically awesome. All of a sudden, kickstarting yourself isn’t really necessary because of the decreased friction provided by the snow — you can just glide along down the street, until you eventually get to a misshapen lump in the road and wipe out. It’s all part of the experience. What the snow does do is reduce your ability to do too many tricks, because you can’t quite kick off that type of surface; instead, you just have to be content with the increased speed and decreased effort of the whole undertaking.

Rally car racing

Think about what driving in the snow is like — you have to go about 20 miles per hour, you have to turn incredibly slowly every time you reach a bend in the road, you have to sit hunched up in front of the windshield so you can see. Now think about what trying to race a rally car in the snow is like. Kind of hard to imagine, isn’t it? These drivers here seem to be basically locked in a perpetual drift, flying around the course sideways do to the constant need to anticipate the next turn and the fact that, well, repositioning the car just isn’t that easy when the road is covered in snow. The fact that all of these cars don’t end up in a heap next to the road is a miracle.

Freeruning

There’s one big pro and one big con of snow when you’re doing parkour. The pro is that whenever you hit the ground, whether in a controlled tumble or at the end of a jump or because you fell, that snow is going to cushion your landing. The con is that, anytime you try to grab on to or get traction on something, it’s going to be 87 times harder than it would’ve been if that snow wasn’t there. Snow is both a blessing and a curse when you’re trying to jump off a bunch of stuff on to a bunch of other stuff, but one thing’s for certain: it definitely makes the jumps look cooler. Maybe that makes the snow worth it on its own, despite the cons.

Soccer

Now, soccer isn’t an extreme sport, but it is something that you rarely, if ever, see played in a snowy environment, and there’s a reason for that. When you have snow, all of the natural physics of how a ball — and a human — moves around the field are completely changed. All of a sudden, the ball is going farther faster than it usually is, and you’re not able to stop where you thought you would, and your teammate’s in a different place than you thought she’d be. Snow makes the game completely different, and quite exciting, but also just a total mess.

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