Arena Snowparks has been chosen to build the Halfpipe for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Halfpipe will be constructed at Cypress Mountain just minutes from downtown Vancouver. With over 15 years of halfpipe construction experience ASP was the obvious choice for the job. Construction on the Olympic halfpipe began in early January and will be in top shape by the time the worlds best pipe riders arrive in Vancouver in February. The halfpipe pipe finals will take place at night under the lights on February 17 and 18th.

Established in 2005, Arena Snowpark Construction Ltd. is a rider owned and operated company committed to the design, development and construction of snowparks and snowpark accessories such as rails, boxes and shaping tools. Owner, Steve Petrie began building parks on Blackcomb Mountain in 1994 where he oversaw the design, construction and maintenance of terrain parks winter and summer for 11 years. In 2005 Arena Snowparks was establish to provide the ski and snowboard industry with access to years of snowpark experience through consulting and contracting services.

ASP crews have started less than a month ago construction on the halfpipe at Cypress Mountain, site of the Olympic snowboard events. Despite some challenging weather conditions in Vancouver area the pipe was starting to take shape with the right wall pushed and step out and the left wall later being pushed. Construction on the pipe continued throughout the next two weeks as crews ensured that every available flake of snow sees it’s way into the pipe.

Installation of the lights and jumbo screen already began during the first week of February and cabling and TV platforms will go in closer to the event.

ASP hand shaping crews arrived last week to assist the pipe builders with fine tuning the snow surface and help prepare for what ever the mother nature throws our way. Despite some mild conditions the pipe build at Cypress Bowl was progressing along. ASP crews have been doing a lot of form boarding and snow blowing to maximize the available snow and began shaping the walls on Tuesday. Work continued through the week.

The Arena Snowparks crew has been putting in some long days to get the halfpipe ready for Olympic competition. Snow conditions have been soft which made for some good cutting on Friday and saw shaping crews cutting the vert line and re-setting form boards to contain the snow. But the forecast shows wet weather to continue and lows aren’t expected to hit freezing, which led to a decision over the weekend by the Winter Olympic committee to limit halfpipe training from five to three days.

Because of the wet weather and mild conditions they will be also forced to use snow hardeners on the pipe closer to the time of competition. The most common chemicals used are sodium chloride, calcium chloride, urea, ammonium nitrate, and potassium nitrate. Surprised? Don’t be. That’s pretty common thing. In most of parks and pipes are using salt (a.k.a. before mention terms) over the summer. Unfortunately also this pipe will have a quite huge carbon footprint.

The start of the Winter Olympic Games is 3 days away. The men’s pipe competition takes place on February 17th and the women’s is on the 18th. Pipe is done and looks amazing, teams are  already made up and for sure the battle between them will be much more than just amazing…stay tuned for more action!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Contests.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.