Skiing: A bold new plan for the Scottish Freedom Series

At time of writing, it seems extremely unlikely that this weekend’s Coe Cup freeride ski and snowboard event will go ahead as planned at Glencoe. There’s barely any snow lying on Meall a’Bhuiridh, even in the famously snow-sure gullies of the upper mountain, and not even a hint of snow in the five-day weather forecast.

If the event is indeed cancelled, it will mean that all three of the contests making up this year’s Scottish Freedom Series (SFS) have had to be canned due to lack of snow: the Glenshee GOAT, which was scheduled to run on 8-9 February, the Corrie Challenge, scheduled to run in the Back Corries at Nevis Range on 1-2 March, and now the Coe Cup, Scotland’s first ever freeride contest, dating all the way back to 2012, but only called off twice due to a lack of white stuff during all that time. Still, for Iain Ramsay-Clapham, CEO of Snowsport Scotland and also the prime mover behind the SFS since its inception in 2014, this year’s cancellations aren’t a reason to get downhearted but a reason to start thinking outside the box, and there are already signs that next year’s series could look very different.

Charles Palmer competes at the first Coe Cup in 2012 | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

Since it began just over a decade ago, the SFS has typically consisted of three or four events, all scheduled to take place on a specific weekend. That format seemed to work fine in the years leading up to the pandemic, when most events went ahead as planned. Over the last few seasons, however, cancellations have become more frequent – if the Coe Cup is called off this weekend it will mean the series has been a complete washout for two out of the last four seasons. Clearly, if the SFS is to survive, something has to change.

Following the cancellation of this year’s Corrie Challenge, Ramsay-Clapham posted a suggestion on the SFS Facebook page: how would competitors and crew feel if things were to become more flexible in 2026? Rather than holding three events at predetermined locations on specific weekends, he asked, what if the SFS shifted to “a more flexible and opportunistic approach”, with a mobile contest called The GOAT taking place at a location tbc sometime in January, another mobile event called The Maverick being held at a location tbc sometime in February, and the Coe Cup returning to its traditional home of Glencoe sometime in March? “We’d watch the weather avidly and give you all 4-5 days’ notice of an event being called on” Ramsay-Clapham wrote, “and we could all eagerly wait in anticipation as we progress through the month.”

Given the vagaries of a typical Scottish winter, the advantages of this approach are obvious: whereas this year’s Glenshee GOAT required contestable conditions to materialise at a specific location on a particular weekend – a gamble, to put it mildly – the mobile, date-flexible 2026 GOAT event would only require good snow at one location for one January weekend, massively improving the odds of it going ahead.

So far, the response to Ramsay-Clapham’s plan seems to have been broadly positive. “What mostly came back was people saying, ‘we agree’,” he says. “One person said ‘don't get me wrong, I book my accommodation [for these events] every year and it would be a pain having to cancel that, but what you’re suggesting is probably the right route forward.’ So even people for whom this would create extra complications are recognising that it’s probably the route to take.

“I think that with two events that become nomadic and able to move between venues, and a one month weather window for all three, we’re going to give ourselves the optimum opportunity.”

Competitors at the Lawers of Gravity in 2016 | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

In the past, the SFS experimented with running contests in locations far from Scotland’s ski resorts, notably in the Ben Lawers Range on the north shore of Loch Tay. However, while the Lawers of Gravity events, as they were known, provided some memorable skiing and boarding in 2015, ’16 and ’18, they also raised difficult questions about safety.

“Our challenge with going into really remote locations,” says Ramsay-Clapham, “is if the medical plan is not robust, and doesn’t demonstrate that a casualty at the event can reach critical care within a reasonable timeframe, then you have to elect not to run that event.” For all that the first two events in 2026 could be mobile, then, they would probably have to take place in or at least very near to one of Scotland’s five ski centres.

A more flexible series would also bring certain logistical challenges: “We’d need a bigger pool of officials and a bigger crew,” says Ramsay-Clapham, “so if someone finds they can’t come at short notice when the conditions are looking good, we’d still have enough people to run the event. Also, you’d often find your field was depleted, because competitors might find they have other commitments.

“So we’d be working with a need for greater flex from the crew and probably smaller fields, too, but the bottom line is that at least the events could run, and could run in good conditions – and running an event is always preferable to not, even if you are running at a smaller scale.”

For more on the Scottish Freedom Series, see www.britishfreeride.org/scottish-freedom-series