Winter Olympics Snowboarding: Trick names cheat sheet, or, what the heck is a McTwist?

McTwist. Chicken salad. Roast beef. Are we talking about lunch, or snowboarding tricks?!

To the uninitiated, snowboarding trick names can sound like a foreign language. Viewers often have hardly any idea what the commentators are talking about during a competition, much less what they’re watching riders do on the screen.

We’re here to help. By the time you tune into the first 2018 Winter Olympics snowboarding medal event, the Men’s Slopestyle Final at 8:00 p.m. ET Saturday, you’ll be able to talk shop about shreddin’ the gnar with the best of them.

Before we get into a glossary of trick names, it might be helpful to break down the way tricks are described. That way, when you hear that Canada’s Max Parrot and Mark McMorris both threw down backside triple cork 1440s in the snowboarding slopestyle qualifiers, you’ll know exactly why that’s so damn impressive.

Let’s start there, with the backside triple cork 1440. (Fun fact: McMorris was the first to nail it in 2011.) You can break each of those four parts of the trick down to understand exactly what’s going on:

• Backside: The trick is performed with the heel-side edge of the snowboard facing down the hill (or down the halfpipe wall, etc.). Basically, the rider is facing backwards to begin the trick.
• Triple cork: A cork is a type of flip where the rider rotates off-axis. In this case, a triple cork means three inversions. Sometimes the word cork will be dropped (e.g. backside triple 1440).
• 1440: Most tricks will end with a number that can be divided back into 360. That’s because we’re counting how many rotations the rider is doing. In a 1440, the rider has completed four complete 360-degree spins.

Got it? That’s not so complicated, right?

So, launching off from there, you can imagine what the following tricks would look like: frontside triple cork 1440 (the opposite of a backside triple cork 1440) and backside 1800 quadruple cork (turning backwards, five full rotations, four inversions).

Now it gets a little trickier. (Pun absolutely intended.)

You might also occasionally see a similarly named trick preceded by the word “switch.” In snowboarding, there are four possible directions riders can spin: frontside, backside, switch frontside (or “cab”) and switch backside. If a snowboarder is riding “switch” it means he’s leading with his non-dominant foot. Snowboarders ride “regular” if they lead with their left foot and “goofy” if they lead with their right.

How about backside triple 1440 nosegrab? That’s exactly what we just went over, except that at the end, the rider adds a nosegrab: grabbing the front of his or her board with the leading hand.

Many of the zany terms in freestyle snowboarding are types of grabs — for instance, chicken salad and roast beef. The former is when the rider uses his rear hand to reach between his legs and grab the heel edge of his board with the front leg boned (straightened out).

Roast beef is similar, but the rider uses her rear hand to reach between her legs and grab the heel edge of her board while her rear leg is boned.

Other types of grabs include melon (rider’s front hand reaches behind his front leg and grabs the heel edge of the board), mute (rider’s front hand grabs the toe-side edge of the board), Japan (rider grabs the toe-side edge of the board in between her feet with her front hand, with her front knee pulled in toward the board) and Indy (rear hand grabs the toe-side edge of the board).

These grabs add major style to points to a rider’s routine, and judges take note accordingly. Slopestyle snowboarding sees riders approaching the rails, jumps and other features of the course at incredible speeds, with virtually no time to adjust between tricks. Having the time and the skill to pull off an extra grab or slide goes a long way, especially for a rider who isn’t able to throw down 1440s.

Tricks can be referred to by their technical names, as in the above examples. But when a rider becomes the first to successfully land a trick, he or she gets the honor of naming it.

That’s where something like McTwist comes in.

Skateboarder Mike McGill got this trick named after him (thanks to Rodney Mullen, who came up with the name) when he became the first to throw it down in 1984. It consists of a front flip with a 540-degree rotation. Snowboarders picked it up, and Shaun White even pulled off a double McTwist at the 2010 Winter Olympics.

There is so much more to learn about what goes into naming and evaluating snowboarding tricks, but this should give you the foundation you need to actually know what you’re watching in the men’s and women’s Olympics freestyle events.

For a complete glossary of terms and tricks, check out this one that NBCOlympics.com put together.

Next: What is the snowboarding grab called the Bloody Dracula?

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