Nico Porteous has finished in second place on the 2018-2019 Freeski Halfpipe World Cup tour rankings following the final competition of the season in the USA.
Nico Porteous Photo: Christian Pondella/Red Bull Content Pool
Nico Porteous has ended the season in second, after struggling to put a run down at Mammoth and finishing in 16th place in the finals.
Knowing that D'Artois and Wise would be pushing hard for the overall win, Porteous went for the no-holds-barred approach, gaining huge amplitude out of the pipe in order to spin his biggest tricks but came unstuck and couldn't get the points on the board.
His second place finish is the best result for an NZ male in the FIS rankings.
Halfpipe qualifications at the FIS Freeski World Cup event at Mammoth Mountain Photo: Mateusz Kielpinski/FIS
Jossi Wells finished fourth overall in Freeski Slopestyle in 2014 and Janina Kuzma also achieved a second place finish in ladies' Halfpipe in 2014.
Canadian Simon d'Artois' second place finish in Mammoth gave him enough points to take the overall title while double Olympic Champion David Wise (USA) rounded out the 2018/19 halfpipe men's podium in third.
Initially scheduled for Friday, the Halfpipe competition had been moved to Saturday following a long series of weather and scheduling-related problems. And while there were major improvements in weather conditions, unfortunately the bluebird skies didn't hold for long, with dense clouds and wind gusts coming into play as soon as the first riders started dropping in for their training runs.
Birk Irving (USA) went for his very first World Cup podium, while taking a huge victory on home turf with a score of 95.20 points for his second run including a switch left dub 1080, right 900, left 1080, switch 720 and a massive left dub 1260 to finish things off.
Second place on the day went to Simon d'Artois, who scored his second top-3 World Cup finish in 2018/19 with his 93.80 points run, while Thomas Krief (FRA) came in third with 86.60 points for his first podium of the season.
With the second place finish at Mammoth, d'Artois jumped into first place in the overall halfpipe ranking and took his career's first World Cup title.