How Snowboarding Is Judged: The Sport That Refused to Write a Code of Points

One number for the whole run

Six judges. Each produces a single score out of 100 for the entire run. The highest and lowest are discarded and the remaining four averaged.

That is the whole mechanism, and what it does not contain is the interesting part.

There is no execution score separated from a difficulty score. No deductions itemised against a start value. No table anywhere stating what a cab 1440 double cork is worth relative to a backside 1260.

A judge watches a run and forms a judgement about how good it was. Then five other people do the same, and the sport takes the middle of them.

Which is the opposite of gymnastics

Gymnastics’ code of points is the other pole. Every element has a letter value, a start value is assembled from the routine’s content, and deductions are applied against a published schedule. Two judging panels handle difficulty and execution separately.

Both systems are trying to solve the same problem — how do you rank performances that are not races — and they have reached opposite conclusions.

Gymnastics’ answer: write everything down, so scores can be defended, appealed and audited.

Snowboarding’s answer: write nothing down, because the alternative is worse.

Why a tariff would break the sport

Publish a table of trick values and you have told every rider precisely how to win.

The optimal strategy becomes immediate: find the highest-valued trick you can land consistently, and do it. Not the best run you could conceive — the highest-scoring one. Every rider runs the same calculation, and within two seasons every run looks like every other run.

Worse, the table always lags. A code of points can only value tricks that already exist. A rider inventing something genuinely new would score it at whatever the nearest listed element is worth, which means innovation is systematically underpaid.

That is why snowboarding’s criteria include progression as an explicit scoring dimension. The sport does not merely tolerate new tricks; it pays for them, and it can only do that because no table constrains what the judges may reward.

Gymnastics has spent decades fighting the same problem from inside its own system, adding new elements to the code after athletes perform them and repeatedly arguing about whether the values assigned are too low.

PAVED, and what each letter is doing

For slopestyle and big air the criteria are Progression, Amplitude, Variety, Execution, Difficulty.

Amplitude — height and distance. The most objective of the five, and the one a viewer can see without knowing anything.

Execution — the grab held properly, the landing absorbed, control kept throughout. This is where “clean” lives.

Difficulty — technical complexity, judged rather than tabulated.

Variety — a mix of trick types and rotational directions. This is the criterion that stops the run-of-identical-spins problem directly: repeat yourself and you are marked down for it, whatever the individual tricks are worth.

Progression — did this push the sport forward? A new trick, or in slopestyle a different line through the course.

Halfpipe uses the same ideas, weighted for a pipe run where amplitude out of the wall carries more.

Notice that variety and progression are structural safeguards, not aesthetic preferences. They exist to make the optimal strategy something other than repetition — which is exactly what a tariff system cannot do.

Dropping the high and the low

Discarding the extreme scores is the same device used in ski jumping’s style marks and across judged sport generally.

It is not primarily an anti-corruption measure, though it helps. It is a variance measure. Six people watching the same run will disagree, and one judge who sat unusually high or unusually low should not move the result by a sixth.

What it cannot fix is shared bias. If all six judges undervalue the same style of riding, dropping two of them changes nothing. That is the permanent weakness of every panel system, and it is why the judging criteria are published and why judges are trained against them.

Best run, not average

Riders get multiple runs and the best one counts.

This is a small rule with a large behavioural effect. Under an averaging system, a rider holding a lead would ride conservatively — the standard problem with cumulative scoring.

Under best-run scoring, a rider who has already banked a good score has nothing to lose on the next attempt. The correct strategy after a strong first run is to try the hardest thing you have.

That is why finals often produce the biggest tricks of a season in the last drop of the day. The format makes ambition free, and the sport built it that way on purpose — the same reasoning as surfing’s judging, which counts a surfer’s two best waves rather than every wave they catch.

The honest limitation

None of this makes the scores objective, and the sport does not claim it does.

A snowboard result is a structured opinion: six trained people, five published criteria, a discard rule, and a number. It can be wrong. Riders will tell you it sometimes is.

The defence is not that the system is precise. It is that the alternative — a code of points — buys precision by making the sport converge on whatever the table rewards, and snowboarding has decided that a contest of judgement is better than a contest of arithmetic.

For a sport that made the opposite trade, see figure skating’s scoring system, which abandoned overall impression after a judging scandal and has been building a code ever since.