JUMPING A SLED: THROTTLE, BRAKE AND THE LANDING THAT BREAKS FACES

The Technique

1. Start with the fact that makes a sled different to anything else you jump. **A snowmobile carries a large, heavy, fast moving track, and that spinning mass is your attitude control in the air.** You do not need to weight-shift a sled around the way you would a mountain bike. You have a far more powerful input available through your right thumb and your brake lever, and it works instantly.
2. **Throttle in the air raises the nose.** Accelerating the track speeds up that rotating mass, and the reaction against it pitches the machine nose-up. If you leave the lip and the front is dropping faster than you want, a squeeze of throttle brings it back up.
3. **Brake in the air drops the nose.** Tapping the brake slows the track, and the reaction runs the other way, pitching the machine nose-down. **This is why it is called brake tapping and not braking.** You are not trying to stop anything, you are giving the track a short decisive check to bring the front down. Tap it, feel the nose respond, tap again if you need more. Long grabs overdo it and put you nose-heavy, which is its own problem.
4. So the whole of your in-air work is a conversation between those two inputs. **Leave the lip, look at where the machine is pointing relative to where you want to land, and correct with throttle for nose up or a brake tap for nose down.** Riders who have never been told this fight the machine with their body and wonder why nothing changes. The body barely matters here. The track does.
5. **What you are aiming for is a matched attitude, meaning the machine sits parallel to the ground it is about to touch.** Land nose-down and the skis spear in, the machine stops at the front while you keep going, and you go over the bars. Land tail-heavy and hard and the machine bucks, which ejects riders sideways and backwards. **Be careful with the phrase "land flat", because it means two different things and only one of them is good advice.** Flat as an attitude, meaning the machine matched to the landing, is what you want. **Flat as a piece of terrain is the thing to avoid**, because a level landing has nothing to absorb your descent and that is what breaks backs and blows suspension apart. **You want a matched attitude onto a downslope**, so on a sloping landing the machine is angled with the hill rather than level with the horizon.
6. **Now the one that hurts people, and it is the least obvious thing in this lesson.** On landing, **the track needs to already be turning at roughly the speed you are travelling over the ground.** If the track is turning slower than your ground speed at the moment you touch down, it acts as a brake. The machine decelerates hard and instantly, and everything not bolted to it keeps going forward. **That is how riders put their face into the handlebars.**
7. **So carry throttle into the landing, and carry a few RPM more than a straight speed match.** The extra is there because the moment those lugs punch into the snowpack they meet real resistance and the track slows. If you matched exactly, you would be under-matched a fraction of a second later, right when the load comes on. **A few extra RPM covers that, so the track is still driving as it bites rather than dragging.**
8. Do not confuse this with pinning it. **You are looking for a matched, slightly-over track speed, not a handful.** Far too much throttle on touchdown spins the track up under you, the rear steps out or the machine shoots forward out from under your feet. The feel you want is that the machine lands already doing what it was doing in the air, and simply carries on.
9. **All of that depends on getting the run-in and the lip right, which is where the decisions actually get made.** Look at the lip before you commit, because a lip that kicks will do more to your attitude than any correction you can make afterwards. Know your run-in speed and be honest that soft snow scrubs more speed on the approach than you expect, so the speed that worked on a firm morning run-in will come up short in the afternoon. Ride the landing before you jump it if you can, and know what is beyond it. **A blind landing on a sled is a bet, not a jump.**
10. **Deep snow landings and firm landings behave differently.** Deep soft snow is forgiving of attitude but punishes low track speed badly, because the resistance as the track bites is far greater. Firm landings are the reverse: less resistance so the speed match is easier, but far less forgiving of a nose-down or a bucked landing because there is nothing to absorb it. Read which one you are landing on and adjust which error you are guarding against.
11. **Practise the inputs before you need them, in the air over nothing.** Small side hits and rollers where the consequence of getting it wrong is a soft landing are where you learn what a brake tap actually does to the nose. Nobody should be discovering brake tapping on something with a consequence.

Common Mistakes

Trying to correct attitude in the air with body weight. Fix: use the track. Throttle brings the nose up, a brake tap brings it down, and both work instantly.

• Grabbing a long handful of brake instead of tapping. Fix: short decisive taps. Long grabs overdo the pitch and leave you nose-heavy.
• Landing with the track slower than ground speed. Fix: carry throttle into the landing plus a few extra RPM. An under-driven track acts as a brake and throws you into the bars.
• Pinning it on touchdown to be safe. Fix: matched and slightly over, not a handful. Too much spins the track and the machine leaves from under you.
• Landing level with the horizon on a sloping landing. Fix: match the machine to the angle of the hill, not to flat.
• Jumping something you have not looked at. Fix: inspect the lip and the landing, and know what is past it.

The Drill

Attitude control over nothing. Find a small roller or side hit with an open soft landing and no consequence. Do it repeatedly with one input at a time: a run where you only add throttle in the air and watch the nose rise, then a run where you only tap the brake and watch it drop. Then combine them to hold the machine flat. Only once you can change the attitude on demand do you go and jump anything that matters.

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