Have you ever been watching a freestyle ski competition, or just an edit, and seen a trick that just doesn’t make sense? Not just that it seems hard, but that it doesn’t physically make sense? If the answer is yes, you probably saw a pretzel.
Pretzeling is, in short, when a skier changes their spin direction in air. They twist their body around prior to landing, making a sort of “pretzel’ with their movement. It seems impossible, but it happens, and professional skier Aidan Mulvihill is pretty darn good at them. In this video from Ski Addiction, Aidan Mulvihill and freestyle coach Dean Bercovitch explain and demonstrate the basics of these wild tricks.
“This is the first episode of a series explaining pretzeling in aerials featuring Dean Bercovitch and Aidan Mulvihill. A Pretzel is a very technical trick, but in the series, we hope to explain what it is, its progression, its foundations, such as the axis of rotation, and how to pretzel.“