QUEBEC CITY—The ski and snowboard jump stands 14 storeys tall in the heart of the city, surrounded by an elevated highway part way up and a beer garden for spectators at its base.

It’s taken eight weeks, 50 workers and two football fields’ worth of man-made snow to get this engineering marvel built for this week’s big-air World Cup.

Big air, which will make its Olympic debut for snowboarders at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, is the embodiment of the latest trend in Olympic sports: short, dramatic, television-friendly events that appeal to younger audiences and can be staged practically anywhere in the world, in any weather.

Big-air snowboarding competitions — where riders launch themselves into the air with spectacular flips, twists and stylish grabs — have been held at Boston’s iconic Fenway Park and in Los Angeles, where fans in T-shirts cheered them on. Moguls skiers have bumped their way down a specially-built hill in Moscow, aerial skiers have flown high inside Beijing Bird’s Nest stadium, and parallel giant-slalom skiers have raced in a sold-out ticketed event in the middle of Stockholm.

“It’s definitely easier for having crowds,” Canada’s Maxence Parrot, one of the world’s best in big-air snowboarding, says of city events. “It’s pretty rare we see crowds in the mountains.”

But such portability also comes with a cost. Instead of riding on wide mountains with ways out if things go wrong, snowboarders head straight down a steep, narrow ramp — often clocking 80 km/h — before they launch into flips and twists, and hope to find the sweet spot on the landing.

There’s little room for error for athletes or course builders. Every angle of the in-run, jump take-off point and landing has to be just right — or Olympic careers can end in injury.

Even on a well-built jump things can go terribly wrong, as Canada’s Mark McMorris discovered last February at an event in Los Angeles.

It had been warm during the day, so to combat slushy snow they used salt to firm it up, creating a bumpy landing area. McMorris flew off the jump into a triple cork 1440 — that’s a dizzying three off-axis flips while spinning four times — but when he landed the toe-side edge of his board dug into a hard ridge in the snow. His body kept going forward, snapping his femur.

“That was definitely a freak accident,” national team coach Chris Witwicki says. “Nobody was really at fault, but that scaffolding in L.A. is hard to maintain because you’re in hot California sun.”

Big air, with its single jump, is a simplified and amplified version of slopestyle, the popular freestyle ski and snowboard event that runs over a mountain course of rail features and three jumps. Slopestyle made its Olympic debut in 2014 in Sochi, where McMorris won bronze. On the women’s ski side, Canadian Dara Howell took gold with teammate Kim Lamarre third.

Big-air scaffolding jumps bring winter sports to cities, rather than trying to lure people into the mountains to watch, and the event’s flexibility helped it make the 2018 Olympics grade. Freestyle skiers are hoping it will be a success there and that they’ll be included for the 2022 Games.

While every event wants to be in the Olympics, which draws a bigger and different audience to snowboarding, Witwicki worries about the show-must-go-on mentality that can come with competing in cities.

“Everyone has the best interest of the riders in mind when they first come up with the idea of these events, but the problem starts coming when you add TV — you add fans, shows, other parts to it — that’s all set on schedules,” he says. “And those schedules really dictate when the riders are dropping, which means they’re not taking into consideration weather factors.”

Quebec’s Jamboree is in its 12th year and organizers expect some 20,000 fans for big air’s finals on Saturday. Many come, they say, for the outdoor party vibe as much as for the sport. The slopestyle ski and snowboard World Cup at the nearby Stoneham mountain resort on Sunday, by contrast, tends to draw more skiers and snowboarders as spectators.

Top riders are always pushing for bigger, well-built jumps that give them more air time and the ability to land their toughest tricks. Parrot worked with the organizers here to make that happen.

“The jump is actually bigger than years before,” says Parrot, who would still like it to be bigger, but accepts that “we’ve definitely maximized the place.”

There really is nowhere else to go.

The jump already uses a cliff and highway ramp as part of the structure, making it unique, and just past the landing area there are immovable concrete pillars covered in the usual urban graffiti.

“They have a lot more air time so they can do triple corks and stuff. A few years ago, they were not able to do that on the same structure,” Jean-Francois Pelletier — project manager for Gestev, which runs the Jamboree — says of the design changes.

While Quebec City rarely has trouble with warm weather or too little snow — it’s piled halfway up shop windows right now — they can’t use the real stuff because it doesn’t compact the same way man-made snow does.

The only time they really worry about weather for this event is mid-January, when they give themselves a 10-day window to make the snow to cover the jump — something around minus-10C and dry is best, Pelletier says.

After that, it doesn’t matter if it warms up. In fact, they’d like it to.

“We’d just have a better show,” he says. “If it’s minus-40 like last year, even if you have a really great show there aren’t so many people.”

So far, the forecast for Saturday night is a balmy — for here, anyway — minus-15C.

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