Last week we were blown away by this Norwegian rookie’s front triple 1440 off the toes, so we hit him up to find out more about him and what the hell he was thinking whirling through that madness…

We’re sure you’ve seen Norwegian rookie Jørn Simen Aabøe’s insane entry into the triple cork club by now (here it is again in case you’ve not), but other than being aware he won the Norway stop on the Nike Chosen Series tour last winter, we knew precious little about him. We hit him up to find out more, and what it’s like to go upside down and round and round reaaly frickin’ fast…

To paraphrase the old dude in The Art of Flight: “What planet the fuck are you from?” Alternatively, where are you from, how old are you, how long have you been riding for and who shows you love so you can go out and do tricks that makes our mind hurt?

I’m from a small coastal town called Kragerø, two and a half hours ride south of Oslo. I’m 21 years old and been riding snowboard since I was around 6. My two older brothers were pushing me all the time. They were building jumps and made rails of ladders. Also the Norwegian Billabong team manager Jonas has helped me on the way!

We first heard your name when you won the Nike Chosen Series stop in Norway. Do you ride many contests or are you more about just sending it on your own terms?

I started riding contests more serious this year. Before I just wanted to hit the slopes and have fun, without any pressure.

When we were at the Nike Chosen Sessions we were pretty blown away by the front double 10 off the toes. We’d never seen such a rotation before, apart from in the 90s when people did frontside rodeos. How did that trick come about for you, and was it always in your mind that a triple version of it was doable?

I was doing the frontside rodeo 7s alot and kinda felt good doing it, so then I tried a double 10 and it worked out pretty good. I did my first double 10 in March this year, and ever since I have been thinking about the triple.

Had you tried the triple off the toes before that session in Vierli, was it in your mind bugging you for a while, or was it just a spontaneous thing you wanted to try on the day?

I made my mind ready for it some days before heading up to Vierli and we made a nice jump with a lot of airtime. I did four double 10s and got pushed by my Billabong team buddy Odd Roar Solerød and I just went for it.

[Here's a fun homie-cam edit with more stuff from the Vierli session, featuring Markus Olimstad and Jørn.]

Jonas said you stomped it 3rd try. How did the first attempt work out, and what was going through your mind as you committed going off the lip?

The two first attempts I didnt make the last 180 rotation. I was full of adrenaline and very focused heading for the jump and didn’t remember having any thoughts at all.

Watching it is pretty hectic in itself. What on earth is it like as you blur through that trick?

It was kinda hectic, too and it all went really fast, but I felt I had control in the air.

What were your emotions doing once you’d realised you’d stomped it?

It was a big relief knowing that I stomped it and I felt a burst of happiness running through my whole body. And of course a bunch of high-fives.

Did you keep riding afterwards, or did you call it a day and sink a few cold beers?

I was pretty shook up and rode some laps afterwards, but those beers were calling my name…

What’s the reaction been like so far, from both friends and strangers?

I’m suprised about the overwhelmed positive feedback. Doing that trick I expected much hate because of the spin to win mentality. My phone has been charging constant these last days. I really appreciate all the good comments and feedback!

Inevitably when it comes to double and, now, triple cork rotations for everyone who’s stoked on the sport progressing and another barrier being broken, there will be someone else who calls it further proof snowboarding’s straying further from its roots and into the realms of ski aerials. What are your thoughts on this?

Many people consider triples as just too much and rather want to see some clean and stylish 5s, 7s and 9s. I agree but I think its good that the sport is being pushed further. A good combination and variation of new school and old school snowboarding is cool to watch.

Final question: how come the Norwegians are killing it so hard right now? What the hell is in the water up there?

We are all a bunch of crazy vikings having a good time snowboarding!

But despite frustrations at his inability to have an opinion – and let’s be honest, he’s not the only snowboarder to fall into this trap – you’ve got to admire the guy’s continuing dominance of halfpipe snowboarding. Hell, we’re guessing he doesn’t ride that often these days which also begs the question: how come no one’s knocked him off his perch yet?

This is not Shaun White explaining how to operate a stunt scooter.

Kazu. Photo: Sami Tuoriniemi

At the pipe finals of this year’s US Open Kazu Kokubo laid down what was perhaps the most peculiar pipe run ever seen in the contest’s 30 year history – considering this is an event known for its poachers that is quite some achievement. We wanted to know what was up…

Having qualified directly for the finals by winning last years pipe Kazu was the third rider to drop following Shaun White, who as you will already know tore the pipe a new arsehole with a faultless first run, and Danny Kass. But rather than stoke out his voluminous fan club with the classic Kazu style he side-slipped the pipe and threw his bib into the crowd.

This being days before the anniversary of Japan’s terrible Tsunami we, as well as most others, assumed that he may have been paying homage to those who lost their lives in the tragedy but not wanting to jump to conclusions we thought we would ask Kazu himself.

Onboard: We are assuming that your side-slipping of the pipe was a homage to all those who lost their lives in the Tsunami of last year?

Kazu: Everybody thinks that but no. It was the honourable way to apologize to everyone for not being able to compete.

Onboard: Was it something you planned to do or was it something you did off the bat?

Kazu: It was not planned.

Onboard: Why did you not compete then?

Kazu: Something twisted on a 12 in practice and I knew I couldn’t perform 100%. I thought I could take the first run but I couldn’t.

Onboard: Damn, well what was your opinion of the riding, particularly that of the top three riders, in the contest?

It is the same as last 2 years. If I can learn double rodeo 12 in 3 days more people should learn new tricks in 2 years.

Onboard: True that. You got your place from winning last year but do you know why Shaun didn’t have to do semis?

Kazu: Same as Danny Kass and I. They said last 4 years winners go to finals. It doesn’t really matter. All 3 of us would make finals anyway.

So there you have it from the horse’s mouth. All we can say is that we are looking forward to seeing him ride again next year and here’s wishing him a speedy recovery.

Back in the day Eero and Heikki were inseparable: riding together, travelling together, filming together… but as time went on they inevitably got on different schedules and weren’t able to hang and shred as much as they’d like. But today the internet’s kind of a big deal and they’ve managed to pull it together to hook up and produce a series of webisodes, titled Cooking For Gas, that’ll follow their exploits this season as they beat the snow-chasing trail around the planet. Episode 1 will be live and exclusive on Onboard next week, so we caught up with the Finns in Japan to find out what we can expect.

Check out the chat, plus some exclusive action footage.

We’d sell a kidney to be able to ride like Nicolas Müller. Have a look at the man tear it up in this video and hear his musings on his life as a pro snowboarder.

He’s a frickin’ cat that boy. His natural terrain skills are supernatural and he’s one of those riders you immediately can identify by his style. He’s also so Zen we imagine him dancing with forest elves every evening after another day of knocking the back of line after gnarly line. A pleasure to watch.

Outnumbered in the interview lounge, discussing anally bleaching by the look of it. Photo: Sami Tuoriniemi.

WATCH LIPSTICK PRODUCTIONS 5 MORE MINUTES PLEASE?! IN FULL HERE

Lipstick Productions’ debut film, 5 More Minutes, Please?!… is set to drop ladybombs on our asses tomorrow. One of only two all-girl film productions releasing films this season, it’s also the first European women’s crew since Chunkyknit called it a day several years ago. Turns out it wasn’t even supposed to be this way. We caught up with the Big Mama of Lipstick, Conny Bleicher, for a little more info…

Are you the big mama of this project?

Yes, I am the big mama.

Good good. Tell us how the project came about. From the idea you’d like to give it a shot to it being ON.

It was pretty spontaneous. I had a meeting with Viola from Sista Sessions and we have an association for the event and we met at the bank to set up a back account and after the meeting we thought now we have an association we could do more for the girls. And then she came up with ‘why shouldn’t we do something with filming’? because together with Julia [Baumgartner] we had this JUSTyrol [video blog] and we did little clips and we said why not do it on a bigger scale? I thought about it for a week and I decided “yeah, why not do it like a real production?” But we wanted to start it a bit smaller and it just happened to grow as big as it is now. I just started to write down the concept and then we got some good sponsors on board and then it was on.

You mentioned a ‘concept’. What concept did you have in mind for the film that you wanted to show?

The concept was just to have a platform for the girls to go riding together, to go shooting together and make a whole movie and to go on trips together. Yeah, that was kind of the concept.

It’s mainly Europeans in your crew. Did you think that such an opportunity for girls was lacking, at least over here?

I think it was lacking, definitely. Nowadays it’s just Peep Show since three years of something, and then there’s the project of Cheryl [Maas] and other stuff, but like all girls together? I think there’s none in Europe anymore, since Chunkyknit.

It seems to just be you and Peep Show this year making all-girls’ productions this year. Why do you think that is, as obviously there’s a lot more girls snowboarding but not as many girls’ productions as there were 2 or 3 years ago…

I think it’s pretty hard because the winter seems always really long but then you have to do competitions and you go on trips with your sponsors and all of a sudden the winter’s over and sometimes there’s a lack of time to go filming the whole season. And it’s also hard to get the girls together… so it’s really hard to get them all on the trips.

You said the sponsors seemed pretty receptive to the idea…

They were. We had a pretty tight budget but it was planned as a small project, and it was. It just turned out really well, the feedback and everything, and we have a really good film director I think. She did an awesome job. Yeah, the budget was Ok but you can’t compare it all with other productions.

Who did what for the film behind the scenes?

I’m the organiser, the producer. Sophie Morawetz was the film director – I hadn’t seen the film before it was done [laughs] so… I really like it but riding-wise I maybe would have put some other stuff in but it’s all good. And that’s pretty much it.

And who did the filming?

I wanted to go with Sophie and Ryan Smith, he used to film surfing. He was on the first trip, to Helsinki, and then I got an email – yeah, he’s out. He wants to film some skiers or whatever. And he was already planned into other trips , but he told me he has some other guy who’s really good [laughs from all the girls]. I couldn’t go with anybody else, the next trip was in like 1 week, so I said Ok I go with this guy [“Loch Ness” cackles Basa]. And he was just a retard – not personally, but he has no clue about filming snowboarding, and we had him on 2 main trips! When I saw the footage then I was just shocked. So basically the whole season I was looking for good filmers, and that was the biggest challenge for me. Sophie was there but then her camera broke… it was a mess.

I guess you learned a lot from kind of jumping in feet first.

Head first down. On the floor, straight [laughs]. Yeah it was really hard, and I was sometimes really frustrated because I wanted to do more trips and I was just asking any filmer, but when it was snowing all filmers were occupied.

So how did you figure out which riders you wanted to have in the film?

[“Just the awesome ones,” pipes in Basa Stevulova.] I first wanted to have a project just with Basa [laughs] Just her, naked, dancing, partying and a bit of snowboarding… But then I thought for sponsors I need more riders so I thought Ana [Rumiha] would be good for cleaning… [laughs] No actually I wanted to go with the Europeans and my friends – like those girls [Basa, Ana, Urska Pribosic] from the east, and south Europe, and Austria. I asked around and saw who was down for the project, that’s the most important one to get the feedback and the commitment.

Challenges aside, what were some of the real positives you took from the experience?

There is nothing. [Laughs] It’s positive to paint all people red at the premieres… No, positives for sure is the outcome. [a long long, dirty conversation about ‘out come’ ensues, capped with bizzare talk of anally bleaching – don’t ask] No, the positive things were when a trip was organised to have the girls together on a trip was just good, and then the best was to have the trailer and see what came out of the whole season, and now in the end I’ve seen the film – I couldn’t change anything when I saw it but it’s just amazing. I love it, and it’s good to have it and now the experience to run another season.

You mentioned you didn’t have much influence in the editing. How were you feeling before the first premiere?

Fuck, I was nervous. I saw the movie one week before the premiere. My boyfriend called me, I was still in work and he told me a package had arrived. I asked if it was a DVD. Yes, it is. And I just had to go home to watch it. I was wet all over, I had a beer, it was empty in 2 minutes and I was lie “Oh it’s amazing, I like it!” Yeah, it’s good.” It was exciting. And when it came time for the premieres either I hide or I drink [laughs].

How did the first premiere go?

It was awesome. It was in Grenoble at the film festival and the crowd was loving it, there was such good feedback and it was packed. We won this ‘Coup de Coer’, a special award from the jury for the best new movie. That was really good.

And you’ve done a couple more premieres now?

Yeah, we’ve been to Innsbruck which was also packed – 400 people and the club was full and we had really good feedback. Pretty surprising and positive.

Did it exceed your expectations for your first year?

Yes definitely. I never expected it like this. I mean it was a really small project, I was at work – because I do it in my normal work time: my boss allows me to do that – so I thought it’s a really small project just for the girls and now it turns out that the trailer has already 35,000 views on Vimeo, which is awesome, so I’m more than surprised.

How’s it being distributed?

It’s distributed online, probably after the Ljubljana premiere, via the Onboard/Cooler/Mpora network and our website.

I’m gonna ask you to sell it now. Cause there’s a ton of video content on the internet that goes up every day… Why should people watch 5 More Minutes, Please?!

Boobs! You can see boobs! You should watch it till the end, till the very end, there’s a strip by Ana… No for sure you should watch it because it’s the only European girls movie, I think it’s fun to watch, it’s good riding, it’s just fresh and fun. Watch it and you will see.

And do you plan to do another one this season? And iron out some of the problems you encountered this year?

Yes! We do. So we have to go and have a meeting. I want to have fixed filmers, maybe with a contract so they don’t just go to shoot skiers. I learned from my experience, and I cannot run this on my own anymore so I want to have Ana on board to help. I’m about to put the concept together and I think I’m going to send it out next week to the sponsors, and then we’ll see how it turns out and how they like it., and how they liked this year’s movie and if we have support we’re gonna do it next season. I hope so.

[Here's the fruits of Petrus's labours - KBR Meets You in full. Check his words and then watch it to have your senses spiked.]

KBR Meets You writes another chapter in KBR Productions’ definitive book on ‘How to be Awesome at Making Snowboard Movies with Zero Budget.’

We caught up with rider/director (and not the other way around) Petrus Koskinen to get a bit more info on the production and their plans for stepping it up again next season.

KBR Meets You dropped a couple weeks back. How’s the response been?

Yeah correct! We have got so much good feedback from the movie and the whole crew is really psyched on it. And the premiere parties in Jyväskylä and Helsinki were truly amazing as well.

Finnish people seem close to professional at partying so that must have been a good premiere. Any stories from Jyväskylä and Helsinki that you can share without getting arrested?

Hahah, that’s true. Don’t know if it’s a good fact or not that Finnish people party quite hard. I think I’ll get arrested if I tell you more. That picture tells you something about the hype that went down.

KBR Meets You world premiere. The hype went down! Photo: Julius Konttinen

Going back to the shooting, did you approach anything differently from previous productions?

I think we had more filming days than in the previous seasons, but it was pretty much the same as in previous seasons. We filmed in mid-winter some urban stuff and when the spring came we went to the hills of Lapland to get some park action. Janne Lipsanen filmed also some sick powder shots with the Rip Curl crew in Japan and France. So that was a new thing for the production and I think we are doing next season some powder trips with the KBR crew too.

Oh that would be the bomb eh?

Haha ! I don’t actually know how it works out when the street kid crew from Finland hits the big mountains. Worth a try.

Going by what we’ve seen from other Finns, there’ll be a lot of tomahawking for half a season and then you’ll fucking slay it! There’s a fair bit of street riding. How much effort do you put in scouting new spots and how you do it?

We look for new spots mainly in summer from every corner of our home towns and smaller towns as well. There are so many small towns in Finland where we haven’t filmed yet! We try to find new ways to hit the old spots too.

Who’s involved in making the movie in terms of shooting, editing and behind the scenes work?

I am, as well as a rider, the producer and director of KBR. I try to keep the whole package together. The movie was mainly filmed by our filmer Mikko Suomalainen who stepped it up to the crew to stay in last season. Also all of the riders have filmed each other a lot. I was behind the camera also a lot last season because of a knee injury in January. But now it’s good. I edited the movie in summer mainly by myself but Toni Kerkelä helped me a little bit. Me and Toni are actually the two dudes who founded the whole KBR thing way back in 2004 when we were little kids. There are also two new guys in our production: Eesu Lehtola who made all the graphics and Mikko Kuiri who helped us to do the music contracts with the bands and stuff. Thanks guys! Good to have you in the crew!

Maybe this is even unfair to ask but… Whose part, for whatever reason – personal, professional, or otherwise – are you most stoked on in KBR Meets You?

I can give you a answer on this, no problem. I think every rider has a really sick section in the movie and every section is definitely worth to watch. No doubt. But as a director of the movie I think I got a really cool and good-feeling atmosphere in Antti Jussila‘s part with the Kyla La Grange‘s song and solid action and lifestyle shots.

Antti Jussila. Photo: Ville Lahtinen

I know your previous movies were pretty low budget. Actually maybe ‘no budget’ would be a better description. We asked this question to Curt Morgan and he was elusive, so feel free to respond similarly, but what kind of budget did you have?

We had a really small budget in KBR Meets You but we got a little help from Battery Energy Drink and Rip Curl. Thanks guys! That’s a thing we are really stoked on. For the next season I’m trying to gather a real budget for the first time in KBR’s history. I have actually got some cool supporters for our next movie but there’s a lot of work left. It’s not easy but not impossible!

Nice nice. More generally, last week we posted three full movies from Finland in one day. What does this say to you about snowboarding in your home country?

Finnish snowboarders are really active these days in making movies. That’s a thing to be sincerely stoked about. Shred flicks are also appreciated a lot in Finland between all the young and old riders.

Hell yes! KBR have made their name dropping movies online. As everyone knows there’s heaps of snowboard video content on the internet of wildly different quality – from shit to fun to great to awesome. What are your thoughts on this?

I think it’s sick that there are so many different shred flicks and clips with a wide range of quality out there. You got to start from somewhere! And it tells something about the thing we are dealing with – snowboarding.

That’s certainly true. Finally, if we held a gun to your head and said, “TELL US YOUR FAVOURITE SNOWBOARD MOVIE OF ALL TIME!” what would your response be to stop us splattering your brains all over the wall?

Hahah. Shieeet! I think I’d have to answer Robotfood’s Lame because that was the first shred flick I bought and I think I have watched it nearly 100 times. It motivated me so much when I was a little boy and it motivates me these days a lot too. I love the awesome atmosphere, riding and the songs in it. It’s great!

Anything else you want to say?

Can you put a link to the movie and our website www.kbrprod.com and our facebook page www.facebook.com/kbrproductions. We’ll be dropping 5 making-of webisodes from January to May.

Bang. Done. Thanks for your time Petrus.

[As a bonus, here's KBR's full movie, Homework, from last season. 25k viewers can't be wrong!]

Austin Smith is a dude. As well as having circular skills that allow him to bag super versatile video parts (most recently his strong opener in Videograss’ Retrospect), he’s also real down-to-earth, and you’re quickly aware that in this day and age where snowboarding’s shuffling round confused as to whether it’s a still a core sport or a mass-market primetime TV product to flog stuff off the back of, he has a clear opinions on what is important. Case in point: his and good friend Bryan Fox’s Drink Water campaign, which you’ll be able to read more about here shortly.

We caught up with Austin at the recent Videograss premiere in Munich and hit him with a High 5…

TOP 5 SNOWBOARDER OF ALL TIME

Oh my god… I hate that question because I have an incredibly bad memory, I’ve hit my head too many times. So this is on the spot, but for me now that I’ve gotten older it’s changed a lot from the people that I’ve met and gotten to know their personalities: that has really influenced my favourite snowboarders. It’s made some great snowboarders even better and some great snowboarders maybe a little less cool in some aspects. Like Louie Vito… I mean NOT Louie Vito (laughs), Louie Fountain – they’re way different (laughs) – Louie Fountain. Awesome dude, best dude ever so he’s definitely up there. Lukas Huffman. He helped me out a lot and let me film with his movie ir77 and is an amazing dude so he’s definitely up there. Andrew Crawford… is just one of a kind, total badass, awesome snowboarder, awesome human. And then just more like strictly snowboarding I really looked up to David Benedek when I was a kid. His parts were always really well-rounded: he had backcountry, he had halfpipe, he had rails and when I was a kid I always thought that was cool when people could snowboard on everything so I kind of tried to do that which is becoming less and less I feel like these days. You have to become more specific. One more… This answer is a little longer than you were expecting… It might be Gigi Rüf. I always looked up to him when I was a kid cause Gigi was so young, or at least he looked young – in Happy Hour he looked like he was like 12 at the time and I was like ‘Who is this kid?! How is he so good?!’ And then he’s just continued to be a pretty rad dude. That’ll work for 5. Or Josh Dirksen, he’s pretty great too.

TOP 5 AWESOME GUYS TO RIDE WITH

One of those would definitely be Jake Price. I don’t know if he’s internet famous enough for people to know who that is. He’s the Volcom filmer, he helped make the Robot Food movies and ir77 and December and now the Volcom stuff (like 9191) and he’s one of my best friends. Beyond that, Bryan Fox. He’s an awesome dude. Curtis Ciszek, he’s probably my best friend, always have fun with him. And then… Knut Eliasen. That’s probably number one dude in the world maybe. He’s got the best attitude and the most talented snowboarder also but he’s had a hard time showing it. One year though he’s gonna blow the fuck up. One more… Lucas Debari. He gave me my first snowboard and taught me how to snowboard basically. So he’s a good friend, good times, he charges. He’s a maniac.

TOP 5 SKETCHIEST SITUATIONS YOU’VE EVER GOTTEN INTO

This one’s gonna be tricky with my shitty memory. One through ten is hitting my head and not remembering what happened the following three days (laughs). I haven’t really had any good avalanche scares, which I like, and then my injuries. Although they’ve been pretty shitty they’ve all been boring. Just blown-out knees. Erm… I’m just pretty loose in general so I roll with the punches when it gets sketchy and I just bring on the sketchiness. Let it roll.

TOP 5 TRICKS OF ALL TIME

Number one is turning. It’s probably my favourite trick. And I’m not that good at it, that’s why I like it so much. Curtis Ciszek and Josh Dirksen are incredible at turning and it really is harder than it looks to make it look as good as they do. Then… probably just like a lot of normal tricks like Methods, backside 7s are super fun cause they’re really easy and you can just do them off anything kind of. I like to hit rails sometimes… I don’t know. Just sliding the rail, that’s a good trick (laughs) , turning in powder, doing some spinny things and then just getting upside down. I try to make it a daily thing to get upside down at least once. It just keeps you excided, keeps you on your toes.

TOP 5 SNOWBOARD MOVIES OF ALL TIME

I think my first snowboard movie… I lived at Mount Baker so I bought a lot of local videos and you’re pretty focussed on Mount Baker cause you think it’s the best, which it is, so I was pretty focussed on just that area. But my first main movie was probably The Revival, that was a really good one, and then Optigrab… I really liked that one. That was probably like the last Standard Film really that I liked, unfortunately. Some Kind of Life, that’s a little newer – that was one of my favourites, and the definitely one of Benedek’s movies like 91 Words for Snow. I thought the GAP Session was awesome too, just because it was such a simple idea and they made a really good movie of what they had. And then the latest one is The Rascals. Bryan [Fox] and Scotty [Wittlake]’s movie. That’s top 5. Just cause of how crazy everything is getting right now; Travis is making 15 million dollar movies and everything is getting so serious and so crazy and they just did a good job of bringing it back a few notches and keeping it true. It’s a very honest movie, just a couple dudes who picked up a video camera and wanted to go snowboarding every day and they did a good job of showing that.

[We cocked up in the current issue – 123 – on our Ask the Expert page, so we wanted to apologize to Mike Fox who got his name spelt wrong, and post the page here. Enjoy the read!]

Mike Fox, DC Global Director, Snowboard Hardgoods is our expert of the month and not only does this guy know shit loads about board making, but he’s also involved in every aspect of the hard goods world: planning, researching, merchandising, marketing, testing, development, production, and design. Here comes the tech chat:

Obviously, the demands of pro riders are quite different from your average jo; How do you reach a compromise on the boards that get used by both?

Our focus with boards has been rider driven from day one. We are one of the few brands committed to Pro-models. Each series in our line starts out as a rider driven project and our riders test and confirm the final results. The other models offered in our line are the same pro designed boards, just in a wider range of sizes and with an alternative graphic. Devun has his own series, Iikka drives the MLF, Lauri drives the Tone, Aaron drove the PBJ and new for next year he has worked with Torstein to create the PLY. The boards we offer to our consumers are the same boards that our team designed and ride everyday. It’s true that from time to time they may love the feel of a certain test board that may not meet our consumer’s needs, but our team is extremely experienced and can make the call on adjusting the final product to meet their needs and also consider the needs of their customers.

Have you ever produced custom-made boards for your pros that looked like the generic model but rode quite differently?

Of course, through our development and testing process with the riders, they try a wide range of boards. Experimenting with shapes, cambers, flexes and materials. We make these prototypes with their graphics so they can continue to work and film with them. The goal in the end is not to create exclusive boards for their needs but to confirm the final board that they will ride and the same one that we will offer to consumers.

What comes first: A rider’s idea or one of your innovations?

We work together as a team and everyone contributes. We’ve had a great balance of ideas that come from the riders and from my team and me. When I come up with a concept or something comes from my design partner, Johnny Q or our factory partner, GST, it always begins with meeting the rider’s needs. So, in many ways the riders always come first.

How many rideable prototypes does your crew come up with every year?

Dang, I don’t even keep track but I probably should. I build as many as I can get away with. Obviously we have limitations and only enough time to test a certain amount. I’d estimate that we tested 35-40 boards over the last year not including pre-production sample rounds, which I would also consider important testing prototypes.

How many people ride a board before you deem it good enough to go into mass production?

Sometimes it’s just one. For example, if Devun is happy with the way a board rides, then I know it’s good. That was the case with his current pro-model. I believe we started out with 4 or 5 protos and one of them just clicked and that was it. I trust him completely, as I trust all of the team. The other testing done by our design, development and testing team is to confirm that we can duplicate the feel of the rider’s board and run it through durability trials.

How do you evaluate the risk of confusing the customer with so many different shapes? Or is big choice always a good thing?

We keep it simple. All of our riders want similar things; all of our boards are twins. In terms of shape, we tweak camber, sidecut, width and tip profiles to meet each riders needs but all DC boards come from the same shape DNA.

Lot of the pros are still riding regular camber. Does this mean the Rocker is more adapted for beginners or intermediate riders?

Not in our case. Our Anitcamber profiles using our Camber Core profile are innovations designed by Johnny Q to meet the needs of our team. Dev prefers only a slight, almost flat Anticambered board. Lauri’s has a bit more but he’s been leaning more towards flatter profiles lately. Ryan Tiene backs the feel of Lauri’s Tone and totally charges on that board, just watch his part in “The Storming”. I was also blown away by Mats Hofgaard’s part in “DC’s IT” riding the PBJ last season. But there is no denying that camber works and every one of our riders have a few MLFs and PLYs in their quivers.

Is it possible to make a board that is truly environmentally sound?

Wow, that seems like a loaded question. The word “truly” is a tough one to contend with since there is so many levels of what is considered “environmentally sound”. In my opinion there is no way to satisfy the requirements of someone who lives a “truly” sustainable existence. The reality is that harvesting materials and manufacturing anything impacts our environment in a negative way. We all need to do our best to be responsible and work with responsible partners to reduce waste, run more efficiently and leave the smallest possible footprint on our environment.

Peep Part 2 of snowboard legend and freestyle pioneer Terry Kidwell’s interview with UK scamp Jamie Nicholls. Once again it is at once interesting, weird and amusing.

As we said last week when we posted Part 1 of Terry Kidwell’s Jamie Nicholls interview, it looks for all the world like Terry and Jamie were on different continents when they recorded this (the only thing missing, our German ed said, was the occasional cut to Kidwell nodding in attentive agreement to Nicholls’ spielings) but that and the fact that Terry occasionally seems to throw out some random stuff about Sims every time should not prevent you from checking this.

Jamie’s is an interesting tale. The bit where he admits he was confused as to why it was called SNOWboarding really shows how far a kid from a dryslope background has come, and when he’s asked if, coming from the UK, he’s ever ridden powder his faux-cocky reply is pretty funny: ”So, yeah I have rode powder Terry and, er, yeah have you rode dryslope? Bet you havent, have yer.”

Someone give that boy a Chinese burn.