So much love in Boston. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
The Red Bull Heavy Metal event is an interesting one. It’s a snowboarding contest, yes, but it’s not held in the mountains. It’s held in the streets. This year, it was held in the streets of Boston, and 25,000 people showed up to watch.
“Red Bull Heavy Metal brings riders who are not traditionally contest riders out to compete,” contest director Joe Sexton told The Inertia. “Street snowboarders don’t always enter competitions, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t producing some of the heaviest riding. In the original Red Bull Heavy Metal contests, it was exciting to see the people from my favorite videos riding in a contest.”
The venue, which was at Boston City Hall Plaza, is transformed into an enormous street snowboarding course that required hundreds of tons of snow. It’s an old event — the first was held in 2002 — but for two decades, it didn’t run. In 2022, it ran again in Duluth, Minnesota, and it was apparent that the public interest was there.
This year, LJ Henriquez and Telma Särkipaju won the overall event. “This is the pinnacle event in the world for street snowboarding right now,” Henriquez said. “To win here, close to home, in front of my friends and family is such a surreal feeling. Everyone here is the best, so I had to go as hard as possible at all times to come away with the win.”
Now that the event is done and dusted, Red Bull took the time to make the video recap you see below in order to properly showcase one of snowboarding’s coolest contests.
