Snowboarding’s all about corporate sponsorship, triple corks and wearing tight pants these days. Sadly Nikita didn’t get the memo and held their annual end-of-season contest with the sole aim of letting some talented ams have a blast all day, making sure the vibe was chill, and hooking the best rider up with a deal for a year. What were they thinking?
This revelation relates to the response that those with a vested interest in your wellbeing habitually say when tell them you’re going for a ride: “Be careful”. Well here it is: I hate that phrase. It’s prophetic.
Panting our way through Autumn like thirsty dogs we, the Onboard crew, finally quenched our thirst for shred at the local resort of Spitzingsee in early December. The snow wasn’t epic, even though some resorts nearby were claiming a metre of fresh, but it was good to feel the cut of an edge on snow and knock a few hits into the banks of the piste.
Snowboarders have always been ravenous for any kind of shred sustenance, but recently the way we sink our teeth into snowboarding’s rumpsteak has changed immeasurably. Following the sport used to be a much more lethargic affair: In the days of old school shred media kids went snowboarding.
Not since 2004, when the main jump collapsed under heavy rain, had the Freestyle jamboree suffered such appalling weather conditions as it did on the 25th of September. But contrary to the pessimists hiding in various dry VIP tents the only thing that went bang were the salvo of tricks put down by the snowboarders.
I read, with trepidation, an article in an annual by Reporters Without Borders lamenting the death of documentary photography. According to them, the financial crisis within print media was its executioner as the genre, including that of snowboarding, is far from cheap to create.
In early November, Nike snowboarding entered the European scene with a bang. Not with the Mikkel kind, but a fi ve-a-side football tournament celebrating the launch of the brand new Gigi Rüf Nike Zoom Kaiju Qs snowboard boot.
Sometimes being a hack in snowboarding can be a real ball-ache, especially when it comes to the interviewing of snowboarding’s paid ‘professionals’. Its not that they’re intentionally coy or elusive;
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