Hello Steemians

Today was the Red Bull Art of Motion event for the sixth time in the beautiful Island Santorini. You are probably thinking right now "What the heck is that?" I assumed that a lot of people does not know anything about this awesome event so I decided to  introduce Art of Motion to my fellow Steemians. As a Freerunner by myself I think i can give you some insights about this event and tell you a quick recap of the copetition today. Let's Start!

What is the Red Bull Art of Motion?

The Redbull Art of Motion, let's call it from now on "AOM" is a Free running competition sponsored by Red Bull© and also recently by GoPro© . You can think of it as an addition to the "X-Games" (where almost all popular extreme sports like skateboarding are part of it). AOM takes place in Santorini, Greece. Santorini is a astonishing Island. It is warm, beautiful and most importantly perfect for Free running. We Free Runners talk about it as the "Free Running Heaven". The infrastructure is nice, the houses are really near each other and the people are extremely kind and open minded. You can probably cross the city by only jumping from a rooftop to another one and so on. It is just magical. See it by yourself below.

 How does it work?

AOM is a competition divided in three main parts: Qualify Stage, Semi Finals and Finals. The qualify stage is also divided in two parts, Online Qualifiers and On Site Qualifiers. Online Qualifiers are about people sending Red Bull short videos of themselves where they show their skill and style. Then people can vote for their favorite video and the videos with the most votes and the approval of the judges will get invited to compete in Santorini. The Judges approval is actually just an organizational thing to avoid scammers win the ticket to AOM.  This year there was a new stage before the On Site Qualifiers called the "Selection Jam". This stage was not really a competition. It was more a huge training session for the athletes. The judges viewed the people there and took 20 of them for the On Site Qualifiers. The On Site Qualifiers are usually open to everybody however this year only the 20 chosen ones could compete in it. The best three then got a ticket to the real competition.

Who wins the AOM?

Free Running is a free and open to a lot of interpretation discipline . There is actually no rules about what is best or who is the best. So the judges opinion are completely subjective. Even though there are 4 categories the judges look up to. First of all is "Flow". This is affected by how the competitors combine their movement with each other. The better the transitions between the moves, the more points you get for Flow. Next we have "Execution". It determines how clean a movement is executed. It does not matter how hard a trick is, if you don't land it properly, it is worthless. This category is also there to avoid reckless movement during the competition. After that is "Creativity". This is actually my favorite category. It is all about new moves and transitions which make the crowd go wow and surprise the judges. And last but not least is "difficulty". This one is pretty self explanatory. The judges rate a move by the difficulty of it. For example if  some one does a Backflip on the ground and another one does the exact same Backflip on a little platform, the second one gets more points because his Backflip was harder than the first one. 

How was it this year?

AOM this year started amazingly. The athletes were incredible, the tricks were mind blowing and the crowd was just great. There was one big surprise in the semi finals. The reigning world champion for two years  Dimitris Kyrsanidis (it's a hard name, we just call him "DK") from Greece and the crowd favorite did not make to the Finals because of a points difference of a single point. That was pretty shocking for his fans. However this was an opportunity to all other finalist to give their best and rich for the gold. An one person did it. Bart Van der Linden from Holland got the best run and won the title today. Second and third were Alfred Scott and Joey Adrian. The best trick award went to Alfred Scott and the best female Athlete went to Lynn Jung from Luxembourg.

Here are the winners social media pages. Go and congratulate to them!

First Place :  Bart Van der Linden

Second Place and The Best Trick: Alfred Scott

Third Place : Joey Adrian

Best Female : Lynn Jung

Photo Credits: 1 , 2 , 3 and 4

Thank you very much for reading this long. I hope you enjoyed this post. I am planning to go there next year by myself and compete in the qualifiers. I actually wanted to be  there this year  but I tore my AC Ligament in my knee. Hopefully I can make it next year to Santorini. I am looking forward to write a blog  next year for  Red Bull Art of Motion 2017.