at which he participated in the alpine disciplines was the European championship in 1991. He took fourth place in the parallel slalom on the same board he used to win the halfpipe competition. In the years that followed, Håkonsen dominated freestyle snowboarding. In the 1991-1992 season, he won 14 international competitions - including a number of world cup meetings - in a row. It has been claimed that he was the first snowboarder during this period to achieve a "rock-'n'-roll hero"-status. The 1994 season was the last one in which Håkonsen participated in the world cup with overall victory as a goal - he felt there was too little time for freeriding and too much focus on competitions. After Håkonsen had featured in a number of different snowboarding films, Volcom produced a biographical film in 1996 about Håkonsen entitled Subjekt Haakonsen. This was followed up with The Haakonsen faktor in 1999. In 2005, he featured in the documentary First Descent, in which he was the first person to ever snowboard down peak 7601 in Alaska. When halfpipe was introduced as an Olympic event during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Håkonsen boycotted the qualifiers. Håkonsen, as well as many other snowboarders, were unhappy with the IOC, particularly because they had chosen the International Ski Federation (FIS) to organise qualification instead of the snowboarders' own federation, the ISF. Håkonsen considered this to be a theft of the sport. Life after the competitive career Although Håkonsen never formally retired, it became increasingly rare to see him at competitions towards the end of the 1990s. Unhappy with the traditional competition format, he created his own competition, The Arctic Challenge, in 2000. The basic idea behind the competition was that it should be on the snowboarders' own terms. In 2002, The Arctic Challenge, along with other independent events, launched the Ticket to Ride World Snowboard tour. This tour, which is now known as the World Snowboard tour, is now the biggest, most prestigious international snowboard tour in the world. Håkonsen is still a professional snowboarder. He spends most of his time recording films and working for sponsors, but periodically appears in competitions. In 2012 he won the Mt. Baker Banked Slalom for the seventh time. In the same year he came fifth in the quarterpipe and won "highest air" at the snowboarding world championships in Oslo. In March 2015 he won the Sudden Rush