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Freeride is officially heading to the Olympics, but this is nothing like racing between gates.
At Alpes 2030, riders will choose their own line down natural mountain terrain, where every cliff, turn and landing becomes part of the score. Judges will look at difficulty, control, fluidity, technique and execution, meaning two athletes can tackle the same mountain in completely different ways.
That unpredictability is exactly what makes freeride so spectacular. One mountain. Endless possibilities. And now, an Olympic medal on the line. 🏔️⛷️🏂
👇🏻
Hermann Maier flew 40 metres — then won two Olympic golds.
Hermann Maier came into the Nagano Olympics as one of the men everyone expected to beat. Then, in the downhill, one turn changed the whole Games.
He hit a bump at roughly 100 km/h and was launched into the air. FIS records the flight at around 40 metres. His skis rose above his head before he slammed into deep snow, hit the safety fencing and tumbled to a stop.
The first surprise was that he stood up.
The second was what came next.
Maier had hurt his right knee and left shoulder. The super-G was supposed to follow almost immediately, and after a crash like that the problem is not only pain. A speed skier has to trust the ski again. The moment you hesitate at the top of a fast turn, the line gets wider, the pressure comes later and the next gate arrives even faster.
Weather gave him an unlikely gift. Rain and fog pushed the super-G back twice, buying him three days to recover.
When Maier finally pushed out of the start gate, he still had to solve the hardest part: attack a speed course after the mountain had just punished him.
He later said the first gates were difficult because his brain needed time to find its rhythm again. That detail matters. Good skiing at this level is not simply bravery. It is timing under pressure: getting the ski on edge early enough, keeping the body moving with it and committing before doubt forces you into a defensive line.
Maier found that rhythm.
He won the super-G by 0.61 seconds.
Three days later he returned for the giant slalom, a completely different test of repeated edge changes and precision. He won that too, finishing 0.85 seconds ahead of Stephan Eberharter.
So the image most people remember is still the crash: a skier flying sideways through the air where no skier should be.
But the better part of the story comes after he gets up.
The man who had been laying bricks little more than two years earlier left Nagano with two Olympic gold medals, not because the crash became harmless, but because he recovered enough to trust his skiing again.
That is what makes the footage extraordinary. The fall lasts seconds. The comeback took six days.
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The Truancy crew just dropped the trailer for their upcoming film, Window Shopping. 🎿
We recently caught up with filmer Wade Peek about the project, the crew, and what went into making the film.
tetongravity.com/truancy-win…
The sheer beauty of electrical storms, I find myself in awe and wonder. I love storms
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A 24-year-old PhD student spent two years sledgehammering poles into a field outside Cambridge to build a radio telescope, then had to read what it printed out.
It produced about 100 feet of chart paper a day. She went through it by hand, looking for patterns in ink.
In November 1967 she found what she called a bit of scruff. A quarter of an inch of squiggle on a roll of paper, in a signal she described as one part in ten million.
Her supervisor said it was interference. She kept going anyway, partly because she was convinced she was not good enough to be there and would be found out. So she checked everything.
The scruff came back, on schedule, pulsing every 1.337 seconds from a fixed point in the sky. Then she found three more.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell had discovered pulsars, the collapsed cores of dead stars, spinning fast enough to sweep a beam of radio waves past the earth like a lighthouse. Nothing known could produce a signal that regular, and for a while they seriously wondered about aliens.
The 1974 Nobel Prize went to her supervisor. She was not on it.
She has been asked about it for fifty years and has never once been bitter in public, saying students were simply not recognised in those days.
In 2018 she was given a special prize worth about 2.3 million pounds for the discovery. She gave every penny of it away, to fund physics PhDs for people who do not usually get them.
cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysof…
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Three minutes before the first moon landing, the computer inside the lunar module started throwing an alarm nobody in the cockpit recognised.
Neil Armstrong read out the code. 1202. Then it fired again. Five alarms in four minutes, while they were descending toward the surface with the fuel running down.
The computer was overloaded. A radar switch was flooding it with data it had not been asked for, and it had more jobs than it could finish in the time available.
It did not crash. It threw work away.
The software had been written to expect this. Every job on that computer had a priority number, and when the machine ran out of capacity it dropped the lowest-priority tasks, restarted cleanly, and kept the landing calculations running. That is why Houston told Armstrong to continue.
Margaret Hamilton was 32 and led the team at MIT that wrote it. She had spent years arguing that software deserved the same seriousness as the hardware. The phrase software engineering is one she coined, partly to make that argument.
Her design assumption was that the operator would make mistakes, the hardware would misbehave, and both would happen at the worst possible moment. So she wrote code that survived it.
Armstrong landed with about 25 seconds of fuel left. There is a photograph of her from that year standing beside the printed listings of the Apollo code, a stack of paper taller than she is. She wrote the instructions that told a machine what to abandon when it could not do everything.
news.mit.edu/2016/apollo-cod…
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During a busy Friday night on August 14, 2026, L’Osteria Mondello, a family-run Italian restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, received a phone order for 18 pizzas totaling about $300. After the kitchen prepared the order, the customer never arrived, and the number used turned out to be fake, revealing a prank intended for social media. Rather than discard the food or pursue a complaint, owner Dave Agovic chose to turn the situation into a community gesture: he donated all 18 pizzas to the emergency department staff at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center in recognition of their tireless work saving lives. The story quickly gained national attention, transforming what began as a frustrating loss into a powerful example of goodwill, and earned the restaurant significant positive publicity and community support.
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A chemist at DuPont was trying to dissolve a polymer in 1965 when the solution came out wrong.
It should have been clear and thick, like molasses. What she had was cloudy and poured like water. Anyone else would have thrown it away as a botched batch with something floating in it.
Stephanie Kwolek looked at it and thought there was something different about it, and that it might turn out to be useful. To find out, she needed it spun into fibre, and the technician who ran the spinning equipment refused. He said it would never spin, that it was too fluid, that the cloudiness meant there was particulate matter in it that would wreck his machine.
She spent several days persuading him. The fibre that came out was five times stronger than steel by weight. She called it Fibre B. The world calls it Kevlar.
She said afterwards that she had not been thinking about bulletproof vests at all. Someone else in the building was already looking for a material for them, and when she first spun the fibre he came over and asked whether she could spare a small amount to test.
Her name is on 28 patents. She signed the Kevlar patent over to DuPont, which was standard for company chemists, and made no royalties from a product that generates hundreds of millions a year.
Thousands of police officers and soldiers have been shot and lived. One of them called her afterwards from his hospital bed to say thank you. All of it rests on a woman spending several days arguing with a man who did not want to run her sample.
sciencehistory.org/education…
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Why Extreme Skiing Looks Different Once You’ve Buried Friends
One writer used to chase adrenaline and do-or-die adventures, now his sharp disdain for such exploits surprises even himself. skimag.com/adventure/ode/agi…
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Here is the video of the sunset #lightning storm last night over #Tucson. Enjoy! Warren Faidley. Licensing through @GettyImages
#lightningfootage #monsoon #SonyAlpha #azwx #monsterenergy #weather #Arizona #stormchasing
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Here’s something wild…
Some of the meteors you see burning across the night sky come from material older than Earth itself.
We’re talking pieces left over from the formation of our solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago.
Think about that the next time you catch one streaking overhead.
You could be watching something older than every mountain, ocean, dinosaur, civilization and human being that has ever existed disappear in a few seconds.
That’s pretty damn incredible.
🤖 Made with AI
Peter Lik,
I have admired Peter’s talent for decades.
Take a look through his eyes and see the world in his perspective.
If you ever get the opportunity to visit his many galleries, it’s truly breathtaking.
🌔 New Release: Twilight Whisper
Along the shores of Costa Rica, the final colors of day spread across the water as the moon rises with an extraordinary presence, transforming the quiet seascape into something almost otherworldly.
🖼️: lik.com/products/twilight-wh…
