The secret to all those death-defying Olympic jumps is a giant plastic airbag

The highlight reel of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics was defined by extreme tricks—corkscrews, twists, and flips performed by snowboarders and freestyle skiers.

These aerial feats are complex, but in many cases, they can be traced back to a simple tool: hours spent spinning and flopping into oversize plastic bags.

Over the last 20 years, a handful of manufacturers—such as Bagjump, Progression Airbags, and BigAirBag—have perfected the art of making massive plastic landing pads, ideal for aspiring extreme sports athletes to push the boundaries of their skills and test out new tricks year-round. Beginning with the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, athletes like Shaun White, Kevin Pearce, Danny Davis, and Sage Kotsenburg began making extensive use of this kind of training, similar to the way gymnasts would use foam pits. 

“The extreme levels the sports are being performed at are much safer due to Bagjump training,” says Martin Rasinger, a former pro snowboarder and the inventor of the device.

Sites that have these systems, relatively few and far between, have become destinations for advanced training. Wy’East Mountain Academy, an extreme sports-focused secondary school in Sandy, Oregon, installed a $4 million bag on its slopes last year that’s open year-round. The 80-by-200-foot airbag, contoured to the curve of the mountain and installed using snowcat vehicles, is the largest in North America, and something that is relatively rare in the U.S. Smaller versions can be found at the U.S. Ski & Snowboard headquarters in Park City, Utah, and temporarily on California’s Mammoth Mountain. 

Troy Podmilsak, a U.S. freestyle ski jump competitor who landed a “Triple 18” in Milan during competition—three off-axis flips combined with five full rotations—trained on the Wy’East bag before the Games.

Bagjump says there are around 20 locations around the world decked out with their landing pads, including their own Banger Park facility in Scharnitz, Austria.

“As soon as those bags come out, you’re working on doing doubles,” says Elijah Teter, athletic director at Wy’East and a former Olympic coach and professional snowboarder. “Now you’re seeing triples and even quads.”

Designing a stronger airbag

The history of these bags is a Venn diagram of entrepreneurship, extreme sports and, in some cases, stunt crews. Before they became a key part of training, learning advanced tricks either meant experimenting during the relatively rare days with extensive fresh powder—which acted as a natural shock absorber for adventurous athletes—or putting up with the pain of repeated hard landings. And after a few jumps into the powder, the impressions left by skiers and snowboarders meant that trainees needed to find a new spot. 

Rasinger tells Fast Company he got the idea for an oversize training bag after watching the airbag stunt fall during the ending of the 1997 movie The Game, starring Michael Douglas, too many times. He was so inspired, in fact, that he flew to Los Angeles, tracked down the stunt crew, and performed some 30-foot drop tests with a snowboard. He realized that to work for extreme athletes, such a bag would need to be larger, softer, and much stronger to hold up to metal snowboard edges.

Rasinger went home to Austria and built a test bag in Innsbruck in 2007; a clip of an early jump was posted to YouTube. Eventually, his company, Bagjump, would settle on a formula: a fiberglass structure with a specific PVC coating to withstand the force and cuts from boards and boarders. The company has since sold a few thousand such bags, mostly to trampoline parks or gymnastics facilities.

Users can get the bags in a variety of sizes, for sports including BMX biking and even climbing. Olympic training bags, specially designed for different snowboarding disciplines such as halfpipe and slopestyle, range from 50-by-50 feet to 120-by-230 feet. The stiffness of the bags can be adjusted to provide more give when learning a trick, and also to feel more like snow to mimic a real landing.

“It’s softer and therefore also safer, because it is impact-absorbing and it does not bounce you away like netting or car tires or foam,” Rasinger told ESPN in 2012. “You still get a bounce from it. It’s better than hitting a concrete wall—that’s for sure.”

These bags and ramp systems also have what’s called a dry slope in-run, which simulates the feeling—and grip—of snow, giving those attempting a trick a much more realistic feeling during a practice session. That ability to train safely and consistently has made them a fixture of elite training, and one of many things pushing performances forward at events such as the Olympics.

“Bagjump has had a significant impact on not just the safety aspect, but also the way the sports have progressed over the years,” Rasinger says.