[Unknown carver getting #relatable in Stubai. Photo: @samoetiker]
There was a time that the tricks that graced the silver screens of snowboarding generally tended to be ones that regular snowboarders could aspire to. Sure, you’d have Jussi Oksanen stomping the first switch back 10 in powder on film, Terje experimenting with natural terrain freestyle on big mountain lines or Romain hitting 30-odd metres of Hemsedal cheese wedges, but as a frothing young buck you could look up to this kind of riding as something you wanted to achieve and envisage a way you could get there – perhaps not on such a spectacular level, but you could certainly be inspired by it and try to emulate on your own terms.
Today, however, those at the frontier of pushing the technical boundaries of snowboarding are riding at such an insanely high level that it’s essentially unattainable to all but a select few. Kids need gym time, airbags, coaches and a sprinkling of disco dust to even get close to pulling off some of today’s stunts, and as a result such riding is becoming – at best – something akin to that lunatic shit the Nitro Circus lot do, or at worst, a turn-off. To blatantly contradict this article’s title; yes, if someone were to pentacork a bunch of people would watch it, discuss it, and most certainly would fucking care (no doubt caring so hard that they’d feel implied to tell the world that they’d prefer to see a slow, backside 180), but unlike watching Johan Olofsson tweak till the bindings creak way overhead or Nicolas Müller painting lines in Alaska, there’s little chance of it making any Average Joe want to go snowboarding. In the grand scheme of things how much would they really care? Mind blown? Certainly. Mind thinking ‘Wow, I’d like to do that!’? Unlikely.
“Kids need gym time, airbags, coaches and a sprinkling of disco dust to even get close to pulling off some of today’s stunts, and as a result such riding is becoming – at best – something akin to that lunatic shit the Nitro Circus lot do”
But herein lies the rub. For riders at the apex of the sport, progression is just as important – if not more so – as it is to regular, passionate non-pros. Learned your first back 3? You’ll want to step up to a back 5. If you’re at the point where you can pull a back 10 out the bag at will, it’s only natural to want to mix it up and try double dipping in the quest of bettering your riding. And this is compounded further when you figure competitive snowboarding in to the equation – after all, these guys earn their corn by doing tricks that are determined to be more difficult than the ones of their peers. As a result, much competitive freestyle snowboarding has reached a point where the top riders are at a level so high that it’s at once utterly incredible and completely uninspiring. It’s a Steve Vai solo when your heart craves Cobain’s simplicity.
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