According to the official FIS scoring breakdown, Olympic snowboard slopestyle unfolded cleanly on paper. Men’s finals ran first, followed by the women’s. The criteria were clearly defined. The podiums were filled by riders who have long proven their skill.

And yet, as tends to happen every four years, snowboarders are leaving the Olympics talking less about riding and more about judging. That discomfort isn’t new. But it’s becoming harder to ignore.

How Judging Is "Supposed" to Work

Olympic slopestyle judging is built around five equally weighted criteria—PAVED: Progression, Amplitude, Variety, Execution, and Difficulty. No single pillar is meant to outweigh another. Each section of the course counts equally. Riders are evaluated relative to what is being done in that section, during that phase of competition, not against some imagined version of the sport at its peak. In practice, though, it’s hard to pretend that years of watching these riders redefine what’s possible doesn’t quietly sit in the room with these judges as well.

Head judge, Adam Begg, was clear on this framework and emphasized another detail most viewers never see: judges are working from a different camera feed than the broadcast.

“After the issues in Beijing, the judging panel brought in its own camera crew to ensure a consistent angle for every run across slopestyle, big air, and halfpipe. That feed offers clearer looks at early slips on rails, subtle instability, and jump takeoffs—details that may read clean on television but look very different from the judging booth.”

It’s an important distinction. It’s also the first place where public perception and official evaluation begin to drift apart—which, coincidentally, is when we’re told we’re not seeing the same thing.

Men’s Finals, DNI, and the Su Yiming Question

That drift first became visible to me during the men’s competition. Specifically around Su Yiming’s second run, where he briefly dropped a grab and put a hand down, yet still scored higher than the eventual third-place score.

Asked directly about inconsistencies, the head judge explained that Su’s second run was identified almost immediately as a DNI (Did Not Improve).

“Su on run two won section scores and was the cleanest until the last section, but he dropped his grab and hand touched. He got a 70 compared with the 9s club on the other two runs. Composition dropped 10 points from an 84 to a 74.”

In direct comparison, Su won the first five sections, while Jake Canter, who finished third overall, won the final section. The deciding factor was that Su’s first run was already stronger.

“As soon as he landed, we knew that it wasn’t going to improve on Run 1...We didn’t spend as much time on Su’s Run 2 score because his first run was the one that would count,” the judge explained. “We were aiming to prioritize where we should use the time we had, which was minimal.”

It sounds logical, but it also exposes something uncomfortable: even when scores don’t change, time pressure and external constraints influence how deeply runs are scrutinized.

Ollie Martin and Directionality

Ollie Martin was another name that surfaced repeatedly in post-event discussion. From the judges’ perspective, the explanation centered on directionality and amplitude.

“Apart from the pretzel there was only one counterclockwise rotation,” the judge said. The rail section leaned heavily backside, and from the judges’ angle the jumps showed low trajectory and lack of pop, which significantly impacted amplitude and variety scores.

Directionality, in this context, is essentially variety by another name. If a run leans too heavily in one rotational direction, it’s going to show up somewhere in the scoring. Whether that feels fair or overly technical often depends on how much room the course gives riders to diversify in the first place.

Women’s Finals and the Podium

By the time the women dropped in, the larger issue had become clearer: the course itself.

The podium, Mari Fukada in first, Zoi Sadowski‑Synnott in second, and Kokomo Murase in third, was supported by detailed, section-by-section analysis from the judges.

Mari’s winning run was described by the judges as the closest thing to flawless they'd seen all day. Strong variety with all four directions. Progression anchored by a switch backside 12. While her final jumps weren’t nearly the most difficult in the field, the judges clearly felt the execution top to bottom outweighed that difference. I don’t know that I fully agree, but I’m also not the one tasked with scoring it.

It’s worth pausing here to be clear about what this is and isn’t. What follows is a breakdown of the judging as it was applied, using the criteria the judges themselves outlined. It’s not an argument for how slopestyle should be judged, nor a referendum on personal taste. 

Zoi brought a progressive and difficult jump line and rode all four directions, but an early slip on a front lip pretzel factored into the execution score. Kokomo’s run emphasized jump difficulty but lacked a switch backside rotation, which affected the overall balance of the run. Annika Morgan, who finished just shy of the podium, earned the highest score in section one with a large gap to backside two on the down-flat-down rail, but a weaker third section and the same missing switch backside rotation ultimately kept her outside the medals.

On paper, I suppose the scores track. But the unease lingered.

The Structural Problem Beneath the Scores

This year’s slopestyle course didn’t leave much room to breathe. Amplitude was hard to come by. Flow felt stop start. Opportunities to build momentum were few and far between. When a course caps what’s possible, judges are left evaluating runs that feel unfinished, not because the riders lack ability, but because the canvas itself is undersized.

That’s where expectation bias sneaks in, even if no one invites it. Judges know what these riders are capable of. They’ve watched them raise the bar for years. When the course doesn’t allow riders to reach that level, scores begin to compress, distinctions soften, and everything takes on that familiar Olympic feeling of being slightly low, slightly strange, and just a bit harsher than it looks on screen.

Layer onto that another part of the equation that rarely gets airtime. Judges are chronically underpaid. These are highly specialized individuals making split second decisions under global scrutiny, asked to convert subjective riding into objective numbers, often with limited time, limited support, and very little margin for error.

Which leads to an uncomfortable question.

Would fewer judges, paid more, given more time, more resources, and more insulation—produce better judging?

Maybe.

But that solution carries its own danger. Concentrating judgment into fewer hands also concentrates taste, influence, and control. Snowboarding has never thrived under narrow definitions of what is “correct.” 

So here we are again. Not absolving, but acknowledging that Olympic slopestyle judging exists inside a structure that makes these debates inevitable.

I was there in person, and it’s worth saying plainly that the whole thing felt a little flat. Part of that is simple human expectation. We watched riders who have been positioned, consciously or not, as the heroes of this era drop in and not be rewarded the way we’ve been conditioned to expect. Not win. Not even necessarily land where we could easily understand why. When you’ve invested years building toward a moment, and the result lands sideways, it’s hard not to feel the air come out of the room a bit.

So much energy and time, not just from the riders but from the entire industry, gets poured into this one event. There are a thousand moving parts, most of them invisible, all of them fragile. In that context, some of what we’re seeing feels like judges trying to protect the integrity of a system that’s under constant pressure. Some of it feels like everyone involved quietly hoping for a storybook ending that never quite arrives. And some of it is the lingering reality that Olympic snowboard slopestyle has a habit of leaving behind a strange aftertaste.

Until course design, broadcast realities, compensation, and judging philosophy are treated as parts of the same equation, snowboarding will keep arriving at the same place every four years, staring at the scores and quietly wondering what was ever the point in the first place.

None of this is to let anyone off the hook. I look forward to the Olympic show as much as anyone, and there’s no denying the platform still carries weight. But moments like this serve as a reminder of how hyperbolic the framing has become. The Olympics are routinely positioned by mainstream media and corporate interests as the ultimate measure of snowboarding, when in practice they fall short of that unearned facade. Snowboarding has never existed comfortably as a single, definitive truth, and asking one event, one course, and one judging panel to carry that burden only guarantees frustration when the illusion cracks.