Which Type of Olympic Ski Event Is the Most Fun To Watch? Here's What Skiers Say

It’s Sunday, and you know what that means—we’re back with the results of another POWDER Weekly Poll!

This week, we asked, Which type of Olympic ski event is the most fun to watch?

Here’s what 845 skiers had to say.

POWDER Weekly Poll Results

Poll Highlights

• Total Votes: 845
• Number of Votes on Instagram: 735
• Number of Votes on Website: 110
• Most Popular Option: Freestyle Skiing (490 votes, 58% of voters)
• Least Popular Option: Nordic (28 votes, 3% of voters)

Poll Observations

• Freestyle wins the day! But the story, probably, is a bit more complicated than that.
• As we’ve noticed in our previous polls, there are often slants that don’t seem to reflect the population of skiers as a whole. Most notably, in a poll about boot flex, 130—one of the stiffest options on the market—won out. What did that say? Most of the skiers responding to these polls are expert or, at least, avid skiers. This time, the freestyle poll hints at a generational divide among respondents: the assumption being that freestyle is more popular among the younger crowd. Freeskiing (events like slopestyle and halfpipe) didn’t join the Olympic roster until 2014. Above all, this is POWDER, not Gallup. 
• Ski mountaineering may not have gotten a fair shot. The sport’s been around for a while, but this is the first time that it’ll appear in the Olympics. And both of the Olympic ski mountaineering events have yet to happen, so many viewers, even if they know how the sport works, probably haven’t had a chance to watch it.
• The Nordic disciplines are a longstanding part of the Olympics, but they remain niche, at least per this poll. That’s not because they aren’t exciting, though. As one commenter on our poll put it: “I love downhill, but a close cross-country finish is hard to beat.”
• Several commenters pointed to an event that’s poised to debut in the near-ish future: freeride. Not sure what that is? Head over to the Freeride World Tour website and watch some replays. We think it’s going to be a big deal.

What We Could’ve Done Better

• For this poll, we really felt the constraints of the four-option format (Instagram, which is a major driver for these polls, can’t include more than four options). Why? Every one of the sports we included is broken up into tons of events. Maybe someone likes halfpipe more than slopestyle, but there was only the “freestyle” option. It’d be fun to know more about how each discipline broke down in more granular detail.
• This was one of our slower polls despite the hype surrounding the Olympics. Maybe a poll about which nations have the best shot at amassing the most gold would’ve done better?

About the POWDER Weekly Poll 

We launch our weekly polls at 3 p.m. Eastern Time every Monday. They remain open until 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time the following Friday, with the results dropping on Sunday at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. You can participate and see the results right here on our website or by visiting our Instagram page.

While you’re at it, drop us a line or leave an Instagram comment if there’s a poll you’d like to see next. Skiers have plenty of opinions and preferences, and we want to know which ones might land on top of the heap.