There are two kinds of snowboarders at the Olympics. The grizzled veterans who measure their success in torn cartilage and broken bones,  and the younger ones who came up in the era of airbags.   

The New York Times points out, they’ve managed to create these mind blowing mid-air moves by testing their twists with the knowledge that trial and error jumps will end with a soft landing on a giant marshmallow.

For the record, the highest dive onto an airbag ever was 342 feet straight down.