Mountain sides
A generation has embraced snowboarding, often at the expense of skiing. But the two worlds, once enemies, are destined to come together, writes San Grewal
The fight for the hill is over: Snowboarders have won. And skiers have finally decided that if you can’t actually kick the competition off the hill, you might as well have fun while you’re on it with them.
“ It took about five to 10 years for the industry to change,” says Jake Bogoch, editor of SBC Skier magazine. “ A lot of the companies still have a long way to go.” The result of snowboarding’s soaring popularity has largely meant that skiing and skiers have had to learn to loosen up and embrace their wild side.
“ The clichéd upper crust side of skiing is still around,” says Matt Houghton, editor of Snowboard Canada magazine. “ But there is a raw side. Skiers are hitting the rails, the half pipes, the big mountains.
“ On the outerwear side companies like Sessions, a raw punk company that went from skateboarding to snowboarding, is now even sponsoring skiers. A lot of companies are following suit.”
It’s been a complete turnaround. Just a few years ago, skiers dominated the slopes, with the odd boarder flying around like an annoying mosquito.
Today, it’s the snowboarders who are swarming the slopes in steadily increasing numbers. Score a win for grunge cool over prim and proper.
“ When snowboarding was first introduced in the ’ 80s everyone was scared of it,” says the 33year- old Houghton. “ There was a very begrudging acceptance. You were looked upon as a secondclass citizen. Skiers and ski hills certainly weren’t openly accepting.” Snowboarding combined the sport’s cool counterculture appeal with a country that takes a backseat to none when it comes to riding conditions. Once the late ’ 80s hit, snowboarding numbers doubled each year for about a decade. Just over 800,000 Canadians over the age of 11 snowboarded in 2004.
That’s a little more than half the number of Canadians over 11 who downhill skied, according to figures from the Print Measurement Bureau. But snowboarding’s influence is even larger than the numbers suggest.
Because as snowboarding has grown, skiing has stalled in its tracks. Like the followers of the dogtown skate scene and the Hawaiian surf scene, everyone wants to be on a board. As a result almost an entire generation of Canadian youth have turned away from the upscale suburban ski scene. Even wannabe skiers have been left out of the loop.
Just a few seasons ago, it was clear: Skiing had hit a wall.
“ Snowboarders were ahead of the curve,” says the 29- year- old Bogoch. “ They had seen themselves as outsiders. They had fashioned themselves as one part surfer, one part skateboarder.
“ The ski industry was always way too late,” he continues. “ Some companies didn’t seem interested in keeping up.” Gliding peacefully down mountains on their impossibly long and skinny 210s, wearing the season’s latest Europeaninspired fashions, skiers weren’t about to let rowdy boarders take over their hills. Skiing had become as hoity- toity, expensive and proper as golf.
That story is all captured in the just released film from Universal Studios, First Descent: The Story of the Snowboarding Revolution. The movie came out last Friday in the U. S. It doesn’t have a Canadian release date yet, but a spokesperson for the studio says we can expect it soon ( check out the trailer at www. firstdescentmovie. com).
It documents the rise of snowboarding, even while many stodgy skiers and some in the ski industry refused to acknowledge it as a legitimate sport. But there are signs of peace between the two groups. Flash forward 10 years since the snowboarding craze went
huge in the mid-’90s
and things are much
more cozy between
boarders and skiers.
The latter have seen
the light, as a re- invention of skiing and skiers is taking shape.
For the past 18 years Colin Chedore has been the president of the Canadian Ski Council, which now also represents the sport of snowboarding.
“ When snowboarding started, a lot of snowboarders crossed over from skiing,” Chedore says. “ One was stealing from the other. There was a reluctance at first to accept snowboarding on the hill.”
In time, hills that once turned away snowboarders saw how much business was heading elsewhere. But that didn’t help the ski industry much. More acceptance just meant even larger numbers of youth crossed over to boarding.
Snowboarding’s influence on the ski industry has since been profound, says Bogoch. The long and difficult-to-manoeuvre 210- centimetre racing skis of the ’ 80s and ’ 90s have been replaced by much shorter ones that allow younger skiers to improve rapidly. Bogoch credits Canadians for sparking the current ski revolution in the late ’ 90s. It’s thanks to the influence of the Canadian Air Force, a group of extreme skiers out of Whistler.
“ They had seen the ( terrain) parks and half pipes where skiers did not go. But they went in there. They ripped the top off. New skis were developed, all kinds of complicated tricks. It grew to where it is now.”
Double- tipped skis and wider, hour-glass shapes now allow skiers to land backward and do almost any tricks that snowboarders can do in terrain parks — spots at hills where snow rails and half-pipes are built that have become familiar sites on ski hills.
Ski fashions have also changed drastically thanks to snowboarding’s influence, Bogoch says. While many companies still cater to jet- set skiers who travel to places such as Vail, Colo., where lift- lines look more like Paris runways, that’s not how most young skiers see themselves. Bogoch credits ski manufacturing giant Salomon for taking the lead in innovative ski design and eventually sponsoring the New Canadian Air Force team. K2 and other large manufacturers quickly followed suit.
Smaller companies that managed to survive have also helped revolutionize the sport with graffiti-inspired graphics and grunge- style fashions that larger companies such as Salomon, K2 and Rossignol now produce.
It’s a far cry from the early days. Snowboarders used to be part of a small brotherhood, seeking each other out on hills dominated by uninviting skiers. Then skiers felt like the minority as snowboarding took hold. “ There was a lot of hostility in the early years,” Houghton says. “ The older skiers felt ownership of the hills. I got all kinds of rudeness and hostility from skiers.” And that was only if he could even get on a hill. When he first started snowboarding in the late ’ 80s, only two of the 20 hills across southern Ontario allowed snowboarders.
“ But Snow Valley outside Barrie would only allow snowboarders at night and Blue Mountain would only take 50 snowboarders a day. You had to hustle up and register.
“ But if you were number 51, too bad.” Chedore admits that a lot of privately owned hills experienced growing pains when it came to accommodating snowboarders, too.
Today, though there are only a handful of hills across North America that don’t allow them access. “ You have to give a lot of credit to the ski areas now,” Chedore says. The ski industry’s willingness to adapt is being reflected in sales figures as a result. Skis made up 65 per cent of the total sales of skis and snowboards to Canadian retailers in the 2004/ 05 season compared to 59 per cent in 2000/ 01, according to the National Snow Industries Association. But those numbers are becoming increasingly irrelevant as skiers and snowboarders blur into one and the same. ID@thestar.ca