Few weeks ago we wrote about the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships in Riksgränsen, Sweden. The event and the resort have a long history of co-operations – this year’s event was already the 17th in a row.

However, the resort of Riksgränsen had its real heyday in the early and mid nineties, in the time when the sport of snowboarding was growing at its fastest rate to date. Various film groups and summer camp organizers (like e.g. legendary Craig Kelly) etc. began to wander to the small Swedish resort to ride, coach and film in its varying terrain, which suited very well to the new type of snow sliding everybody seemed into.

Especially the so called quater pipe hits were all the rage back then in Riksgränsen. This whole movement peaked in the spring 1996, in May, when Swedish rider Ingemar Backman did his gigantic backside air on a quarterpipe built on a natural feature.

That air was a huge leap back then and it remained as the highest qp air for five years after, beaten only by Heikki Sorsa in Artic Challenge 2001 held in Oslo, Norway. This BS air gained Ingemar the reputation of one of the greatest riders of the era.

One little known fact is also the following:

When people started to pack their stuff and leave the location, amazed on the hugeness of Ingemar’s air, local skier and that time cleaner man in Riksgränser hotel, Jan Aikio, appeared from nowhere and hit the same jump on skis, only missing maybe a feet or so of Ingemar’s air. Today that jump would probably have labeled as just another huge but slightly sketchy qp air. But at the time there wasn’t that many skiers pulling huge quater pipe airs, and Jan got Powder cover for the stunt later that year (by Scott Markevitz himself, I if remember correctly?).

It would be really cool to find that cover photo from somewhere? I still remember that issue, paging through it in the local book store, anxioysly waiting for the coming winter. Anyway, I couldn’t find any info on that skier air from 1996. And to my suprise Youtube only has one video of Ingemar’s jump either. I guess we have all forget how short time ago anything this marginal didn’t end up to internet or to any other big media either!