The Story of Freeskiing’s Most Visionary Event Ever: The Candide Invitational

High above the French mountain village of La Clusaz, where the sharp limestone ridges of Haute-Savoie break through a sea of clouds, the Balme sector sits like a frozen sanctuary. In the early 2000s, before viral internet clips redefined freeskiing, this valley belonged to Candide Thovex and his friends. Then between 2003 and 2007, the French rider organized the Candide Invitational, a spring gathering that fundamentally shifted what was thought possible on snow. As documented in The Candide Invitational Story, a 2006 film produced by Enjoy Studios, Thovex gathered the world’s best skiers and snowboarders not for prize money or TV cameras, but to push the boundaries of their sport on massive, hand-sculpted snow architecture — and to remind everyone what skiing was all about.

The mountain itself dictated the riding in La Clusaz. Long before heavy machinery moved onto the slopes, Balme was famous among locals for its natural rollers, wind-molded lips, and playful features that already existed organically. In archival footage from The Candide Invitational Story, Thovex — who is notoriously media-adverse — reflected on his early years exploring these slopes, saying, “We used to ride in Balme and ski with my friends, and this place is incredible — it’s like a natural snow park. You don’t need to shape anything; just go ride, and have fun all day.” Driven by that simple philosophy, Thovex approached resort directors with a radical proposal: create an unconstrained, non-competitive gathering where riders could follow each other through custom features without judges, bibs, or any sort of winning-oriented pressure. It was raw artistic expression — a masterpiece in the making.

• Related: La Clusaz, France, Report: One of Those Days

Transforming a high-alpine bowl into a freeride amphitheater was an exhausting, unpredictable endeavor for Thovex and his team. For weeks leading up to each event, twenty-person shovel crews worked alongside heavy snowcats, moving thousands of tons of snow across cold, volatile slopes. Shapers battled heavy winds, sudden whiteouts, and even late-season avalanches that swept through sectors right before completion. Thovex worked alongside the crew, shaping features directly on the mountain rather than relying on blueprints. As Thovex admitted in the documentary, “It’s just difficult to put ideas on paper before starting on them on the terrain.”

What emerged from that raw snow was unlike anything the sport had ever seen. The features were big, artistic, and visually staggering. There was the Daltons Zone, a rhythm section built from four sequential step-up kickers marching down the slope, allowing riders to link massive airs in smooth succession. Higher up, shapers cut the Trou de Balme features, where intersecting jumps allowed one rider to blast across a deep snow hole while another soared directly overhead across a hip. In one of the most surreal builds in freestyle history, organizers hired a helicopter to fly a massive, limbless tree into the tree-free alpine bowl. Shapers packed snow against its base, sculpting a twenty-meter vertical quarterpipe directly up the trunk. Riders like a young Sammy Carlson would charge the wall, stall out at the top against the dark wood of the tree, and drop backward into the landing.

• Related: La Clusaz, France, Report: Skiing in the Footsteps of a Legend

When afternoon light faded over the peaks, the energy drifted down to the edge of the village. During low-snow years, large flatbed trucks hauled tons of snow into town, dumping it on the streets to construct night-jib features lit by halogen lamps. Crowds packed the sidewalks while riders hit rails, wallrides, and boxes, riding purely for the crowd and each other. The nights doubled as a cultural festival, anchored by live reggae concerts featuring artists flown in directly from Jamaica. The heavy basslines echoed off the centuries-old stone buildings of La Clusaz.

By 2007, the scale of the builds reached a frightening threshold with the construction of “Big Bertha,” an enormous step-down jump designed to hurl skiers over a vast chasm onto a steep landing. Fabian Catteo, one of Thovex’s go-to snowcat operators and jump shaper who helped build the feature, reflected candidly on its true dimensions in The Candide Invitational Story. “She was 45 meters long; I had talked about 40, 42 meters, but that was not to scare people off. It was pretty hard to measure; we dont have the tools — we are not geometricians!” Catteo explained. Dropping into Big Bertha required terrifying, unhesitating speed. The gap was so wide and the approach so fast that going into it tested even the world’s most fearless riders. During the 2007 session, Thovex dropped in, cleared the massive gap, but came down short on the knuckle, shattering his back upon impact and requiring emergency surgery.

The crash brought the Invitational to a sudden, sober end, but it marked the beginning of another chapter in Thovex’s legend. After an arduous recovery, he returned to the snow, shunning traditional park contests to ski deep powder in Japan and launch himself off massive backcountry cliffs in La Clusaz. In 2010, he entered the Freeride World Tour as a wildcard entry and won the world title on his first attempt. Soon after, his self-shot One of Those Days video series captivated tens of millions of viewers on YouTube with his flawless speed, natural vision, and peerless style. While the massive snow shapes of the Candide Invitational have long since melted back into the pastures of Balme, the event remains a monument to a golden era in freestyle when a quiet local skier gathered his friends to show the world just what riding could and should be: Art.