The New Zealand Junior Freeride Tour (NZJFT) is the brainchild of Head Judge of NZ Freeskiing Dion Newport. Dion is North Island boy who grew up in Napier. Winter weekends involved packing into the car in the early hours for the chance to skid around his home mountain Whakapapa on a snowboard. After school he moved south and swapped his board for skis. He started competing in freeskiing and then moved into judging. This was the time when a tiny young Wanaka local with a blond ponytail (Jossi Wells) was kicking all the old boy’s butts.

The judging gig grew from local NZ events to the world stage. The late great Jim Jack took Dion under his wing on the USA Freeskiing World Tour in 2008 and now Dion finds himself as one of the head judges for the prestigious Freeride World Tour in Europe. Although freeriding is where his passion lies he has also judged a lot of park events and he got selected for the panel at the Sochi Olympics last year for the first ever ski slopestyle and halfpipe events.

Dion (alongside a an epic freeride volunteer community ) has created the NZJFT to give back to the industry and develop our young athletes. “Over the years I have witnessed the incredible talent that has come out of NZ. Freeriding is a natural progression for most riders but what they need to get to the next level is competition experience. A lack of high level junior comps in NZ is a major gap. I wanted to create a series of events to support and grow our junior riders.”

Along with growing the junior tour growing Dion hopes to rebuild the FWQ tour in NZ to help our top level kiwi athletes get much needed points to qualify for the Freeride World Tour. “NZ used to have an established freeride tour and I have watched it fall apart over the years due to lack of funding and support. I am committed to getting it up and running again with the financial assistance of some great industry partners”.