Scoul, Switzerland – With the Southern Hemisphere leg done and dusted, the TTR World Snowboard Tour is taking a brief hiatus before turning all focus to the Northern Hemisphere competition calendar for the Tour’s 10th anniversary season.

New for the TTR Tour this year is the introduction of an all-new World Tour Ranking system that is now broken out to rank riders in individual disciplines: Overall Tour Ranking, Halfpipe Tour Ranking, Slopestyle Tour Ranking and Big Air Tour Ranking.  In addition, the TTR World Tour has a new 6Star competition onboard, the World Snowboarding Championships, which will feature halfpipe, quarterpipe and slopestyle with a huge prize purse worth half a million U.S. dollars.

The 6Star event calendar has shaped up to be an elite list of classic events that have been around for years with the added highlight of the inaugural World Snowboarding Championships (WSC).  The 6Star Tour will begin in December with the Shaun White Oakley Air & Style Beijing in China, where riders will go head-to-head in the city’s famed “bird’s nest” National Stadium.  The Tour will then move to Switzerland in January for the O’Neill Evolution in Davos and the Burton European Open in Laax.  The European Open marks a significant milestone in the season since it will act as the qualification cut-off for the all-new World Snowboarding Championships going down in Oslo, Norway in February.

But, before the WSC gets going, riders will make a stop off in Austria for one of the longest-running events in snowboarding: The Billabong Air & Style Innsbruck.  The season will be capped off with the cornerstone of freestyle snowboarding events, the 30^th annual Burton U.S. Open, where TTR will crown the Overall, Halfpipe and Slopestyle Tour Champions.  The combined prize purse of all 6Star events for the 2011-12 season is worth a whopping $1.15 million USD.

This year’s crop of 5Star events also includes some healthy prize money and opportunities for riders to bank valuable TTR Ranking points in all disciplines.  The 5Star calendar already kicked off with the Billabong Ante Up back in July and the Burton New Zealand Open in August, and will continue with the Sprint U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix set to go down in Copper Mountain, Colo., right after the Air & Style Beijing in December.

Riders have the opportunity to compete at 5Star events across the globe with the Relentless Big Air Stuttgart in Germany, The Nanshan Open in China, Burton Canadian Open in Canada, Burn River Jump in Italy and the Nescafé Champs Leysin in Switzerland.  In other 5Star event news, the Roxy crew is back on board with an all-women’s event called the Roxy Snow Pro going down in February and the Quiksilver Spring Battle has been upgraded from a 4Star event to join the 5Star lineup.  The 5Star event series for the 2011-12 season features a combined prize purse of over $500,000 USD.

 Key: BA – Big Air; SS – Slopestyle; HP – Halfpipe; QP – Quarterpipe