It makes sense – from a cinematic point of view, the spectacle of someone doing a 360 on a board or a backflip on skis requires little explanation. Freestyle contests can be staged on or near regular pistes making them easily accessible. In the case of Big Air, they can even be held in the middle of cities.

Freeride contests, almost by definition, have to be held in places that are more difficult to reach. And in the three decades since Apocalypse Snow was released, we’ve become so accustomed to seeing freestyle in videos that watching a part (let alone an entire movie) that doesn’t contain a single trick seems strange. For the longest time, riding fast and straight down a mountain just wasn’t that interesting to a lot of people. Well, until recently.

“I’m not saying that a triple cork is not impressive, it’s very impressive. But it is getting very difficult to relate to. With freeriding, everyone can relate.”

As freestyle has become more complicated it’s become more difficult to understand. Rail tricks – hardways, switch-ups and the like – have become so technical that even commentators frequently call them wrong. On jumps, double, triple and even quadruple corks are now possible.

The complaint that these modern moves are “just gymnastics”, is one that you hear ever more frequently from core snowboarders and skiers. And for an average viewer – for audiences outside of skiing and snowboarding’s core – freestyle is becoming increasingly difficult to relate to. Could the pendulum of popularity be swinging back in the opposite direction?

“I think the big difference with freestyle and freeride,” Bertrand explains, “is that with freestyle, if you’re a 14-year-old and you can really understand what’s happening, you can picture yourself eventually trying to do that. [But] with freeriding, everyone can relate.”

Looking around at the two-thousand-strong crowd who are watching with us, it’s hard to argue with him. This audience is not only larger than any I’ve seen slopeside at any of the major freestyle events I’ve been to (including the US Open and the X Games), it’s also more mixed.

Grizzled Swiss mountain men with fat skis or splitboards mingle with posh British families and young park rats. People gasp at particularly impressive cliff drops and cheer as the results of their countrymen are posted on the big screen. A group of young skiers are creating a carnival atmosphere – they’ve brought drums, trumpets and football style chants, forcing Bertrand to speak loudly to be heard.

Meanwhile the X Games, the biggest annual freestyle event in terms of media coverage, also attracts bigger viewer numbers than the FWT. Again stats for TV are hard to come by but Danny Chi, a spokesman for the ESPN-run competition, told Mpora: “This year we had a total of 12.1 million minutes viewed of X Games via Watch ESPN [their online subscription service] and the X Games website for the Aspen event.”

To match that online streaming figure, the 150,000 FWT fans tuning into watch the Alaska event would have to watch an average of an hour and a half of the three-hour broadcast – unlikely given the nature of attention spans online.

“Grizzled Swiss mountain men with fat skis or splitboards mingle with posh British families and young park rats.”

However, if freeriding viewing figures are still some way behind those for flagship freestyle events, they’re catching up. Even Chi admits that, for the average Joe, the complexities of modern freestyle can make it more difficult to understand than freeriding: “If you’re talking about a mainstream viewer who tunes in maybe once or twice a year to watch X Games then I think it’s not going to be as easily digestible for them.

“Hey, I’ve been working on the X Games a long time but I’m still not able to call all the rail tricks right,” he says. Although he explains that given the contest’s target audience, this isn’t necessarily a problem. “I could easily walk downstairs from my office in LA and very quickly flag down about a dozen kids who could do that for me.”

It’s not just modern tricks that make it hard for casual viewers to understand freestyle contests either. Rival tours run by the Federation Internationale du Ski (the FIS – who control the Olympic qualification process) and the World Snowboard Tour (the WST – seen by many riders as the legitimate governing body) make competitive freestyle snowboarding very hard to follow.

In the long term this trend looks likely to continue. Freestyle, as both Chi and Denervaud point out, is a young person’s game. The pros who top the podiums are getting younger by the year. But as the original generation of snowboarders and freeskiers grows up, they’re moving away from the parks, and taking up freeriding in ever greater numbers.

James Stentiford, a freeride coach who runs courses from Chamonix, says: “Snowboarding has always been a very young person’s sport. But if I look at my clientele, it’s basically 30 somethings up to nearly 60 somethings.” According to the most recent SIA report, a quarter of the 7.6 million snowboarders who visited American resorts last season were over the age of 35.

As the demographic buying freeride kit grows, the discipline will inevitably attract more sponsorship for videos, events and athletes. Already the past five years has seen a growth in the number of freeride-only snowboard movies, like Jeremy Jones’ impressively popular Deeper, which spawned two sequels. Similarly, it’s easy to imagine more freeride events springing up and joining the world tour. I ask Danny Chi whether the X Games would ever consider a freeriding contest.

“With 53 million views Cody Townsend’s clip – a freeride line – became the most-watched skiing video of all time.”