The quartet spend their days and Jyvaskyla's long, dark midwinter nights finding rails, walls and other beguiling items of street furniture in their hometown. What they find, they ski on. Or over, or under, or through. They call it "urban skiing."

"We try to choose our spots so we aren't too close to people's homes," says Korpela. "The one time the police kicked us out was when we were filming about 200 meters from the local hospital, in between two roads."

Dozens of dangerous takes might be needed to get each trick right, but it pays off: short compilations are uploaded to Vimeo and each one becomes a hit with thousands of Facebook fans. There have, as yet, been no serious injuries.

Disciplines like slopestyle incorporate a lot of the same moves you will see Real Skifi pulling off in their videos.

As a sport, freestyle speaks to them far more than watching one skier after another race the clock down the same old slope -- Vonn or no Vonn.

"It would be boring to just ski down the slope," says Verneri Hannula. "That's why we like to do tricks. When we do tricks, the only limit is our imagination. But when we do alpine skiing, the limit is the 100m-high slope we have."

Kilkki adds: "The only skiing you see on television is pretty much alpine stuff, and that's boring to my eyes.

"Freeskiing is a wildly rising sport. Our local ski hill is full of young kids on their new twin tips (double-ended freestyle skis). That's one reason our videos have become popular. Freeskiing is a lot different from alpine, the videos are a much bigger part of the sport."

Freestyle skiing now enticingly combines a young, passionate fanbase, avidly consuming the sport through the web, with a raft of Olympic disciplines which are guaranteed mainstream airtime next year.

But if alpine racing's position on top of the pile is ever to be truly threatened, freestyle needs to match alpine's impressive presence on worldwide TV, which remains the kingmaker of sports even this far into the 21st Century.

For example, Olympic downhill champion Vonn (televised) has more than 150,000 Twitter followers; ski cross world champion Serwa (streamed) has 650. That makes Sochi 2014 an unparalleled opportunity which freestyle athletes know they must take.

"Alpine will always be strong, it has its roots set pretty deep," admits Serwa. "But we're going to get more followers from a younger crowd. We race at the X Games and that crowd, those kinds of kids will be watching it when they grow up.

"Right now we're battling most with exposure. I believe we have only three or four races broadcast in Canada this year, and last year we had none, not even a race that was held in Canada. For us to get big, we need that TV time.

"Once people see freestyle skiing, they'll really get into it. We won't have to do anything different from what we're doing right now to get people to follow it."