Published at: 06:02 pm - Saturday February 04 2012
You’ve got to hand it to Travis Rice. He may have been criticised in some quarters for the OTT helicopter-porn of much of the Art of Flight (see the article in Whitelines snowboarding magazine, for example) but you have to admire the way he’s constantly striving to innovate and use his unprecedented profile to take snowboarding forward.
Rice’s latest venture is the Red Bull Supernatural event, held this past weekend at Baldface Lodge in Nelson, BC. Rice and his crew picked one steep slope, constructed 80 obstacles on there and invited 18 of the world’s best riders along to session the course in an attempt to find ‘the best all round snowboarder’ as he put it in the official Red Bull press spiel. Those 18 riders include the world’s true heavy hitters, including backcountry purists such as Terje, Nicolas Muller and John Jackson. Check em out.
The idea was to get the riders there for a week-long holding period, wait for the best weather and hold the contest on one day, so really it borrowed heavily from surfing events such as the Eddie Aikau. True, there are some parts of the concept you could criticise – namely building obstacles on a natural run – but you have to say it’s refreshing to see one of snowboarding’s top pros step up and try and bring things forward with a new way of thinking about contests.
We’ve been heavily involved in the debate about the future of snowboarding contests here at ACM, through our regular Shaking Hands With the Devil blog and a recent article for TransWorld Business on the subject. In that last piece, we mentioned a crucial element necessary if snowboarding contests are to make a leap to mainstream on their own terms: a concept the mainstream can easily understand. Whether it turns out this way with Supernatural remains to be seen, but in putting together a course that the riders relate to (and then by inking a deal to show the whole thing on NBC), Rice is at least attempting to deal with those issues on snowboarding’s own terms.
One of the other whole questions this tedious Olympic debate has thrown up has been a simple one: where are the leaders of our sport, the ones that should be taking responsibility and representing snowboarding in the right way? Looks like Travis has stepped right up with this latest venture. Can’t wait to see the footage and imagery. Knowing Rice, he’ll probably win the thing as well.
I heard an interesting conversation with a friend recently that got me thinking. We were talking about a well-known up-and-coming ripper (OK, it was Jamie Nicholls) who’d just won a big inner city rail contest. Looking at the coverage, he’d been killing it all day and had deservedly taken home the pay cheque and the kudos that goes with the biggest, most high-profile win of his fledgling career.
You’d think it was all good, but my friend saw things differently. The problem? The fact that he’d been wearing a helmet during the contest. For this skeptical onlooker, this wasn’t on at all.
“He’s wearing a helmet while riding rails! The other guys aren’t wearing helmet. Skaters don’t wear helmets when they’re hitting handrails. Why the hell is a snowboarder?”
At the time it was just a boozy argument about the usual snowboarding rubbish. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that, in today’s current snowboarding climate, it’s a debate that throws up any number of talking points.
The first one can be summed up in two words: Kevin Pearce. I wonder what he’d think about somebody suggesting that anybody wearing a helmet in a competition was less credible, core or deserving of victory? I’d sure be interested to know. At the time of writing, Sarah Burke has just died from traumatic head injuries, despite the fact that she was wearing a helmet. In light of these two incidents, are we really going to start telling pro kids they can’t wear helmets because it essentially means they’re less cool than skateboarders? To some, it would appear so.
The other thing that springs to mind is the fact that, for most kids these days, riding while wearing a helmet is actually pretty normal. For them, the idea that wearing a helmet might be in any way uncool or not core went out of fashion with the step-in binding*. Personally, there are plenty of things I find completely weird about snowboarding these days, from that frankly bizarre tall T trend from the other year to the fact that Nike make snowboarding boots that I am actually considering wearing one of these days.
But that’s what happens and how it has been since the dawn of time. Things evolve. Change occurs. To paraphrase the great Douglas Adams, if you’re under twenty, any new development like this is completely normal. If you’re in your twenties, it’s vaguely strange but pretty cool and with any luck you might be able to make a career out of it. If you’re over thirty, it’s nothing more than evil proof that things aren’t as good as they were back in your day and that modern life is total, utter rubbish. As Adams put it, ‘Apply this to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are’.
All that aside, what is really interesting about this story to me is what it reveals about attitudes at the core end of snowboarding. Which is that even now, in 2012, some snowboarders STILL have an inferiority complex when it comes to skateboarding.
I mean, maybe it’s just me, but if you were going to pick out one fundamental difference between skateboarders hitting handrails and snowboarders hitting handrails, it wouldn’t be the fact that this one snowboarder wore a helmet at a rail contest one time. You’d probably pick the rather more glaringly obvious difference: that a snowboard is stuck to a rider’s feet, while a skateboard isn’t.
Or you could pick another random difference. Like the fact that skateboarders don’t tend to build little snow ramps or use weird pulley systems in order to get onto rails in the first place. Whereas at most inner city rail comps and in plenty of videos, snowboarders do exactly that.
The point is that short of hitting handrails with a noboard or a snow skate, there’s not really any way around the fact that snowboarding is basically easier than skateboarding. It’s one reason why skateboarders think snowboarding is a bit of a joke. No amount of telling an eighteen year-old kid who’s just flung himself down a flight of stairs for a crowd’s enjoyment that helmets are wack is going to change that.
Personally, I’m thinking it’s about time we accepted (maybe even celebrated) the fact that snowboarding – whether hitting a rail or riding a half pipe – is fundamentally different to skateboarding. And that there might even be certain advantages to this state of affairs. After all, having the thing attached to your feet (or maybe even wearing a helmet) means the sport can progress in weird and wonderful ways that skateboarding can’t match. Check out Jed Anderson, above. Here’s a kid who can skate, is absolutely killing rails on a snowboard – and he’s wearing a helmet. Guess he didn’t get the memo either.
Having the thing attached to your feet also means snowboarders can experience certain fundamental board-riding pleasures our skate cousins will never get to experience. Like what? Er, like the powder turn. How about that one? So which is better now?
Sure, maybe you personally think that in the wider standing sideways scheme of things, skateboarding is always going to be fundamentally gnarlier and more credible. You might even be right. But that’s OK. After all, as a certain group of pro riders have been saying a lot recently, we are snowboarding. We’re different to those other guys.
Shouldn’t we just accept that and get on with it?
*For any kids scratching their head at the phrase ‘step-in binding’, yes brands like Burton did try to market them. Certain top pros even wore them. Even on handrails.
One of the side effects of spending part of the last year investigating snowboarding in the Olympics has been an unhealthy interest in how other sports have handled this most delicate of transitions.
So when I saw this article in Reuters earlier in the year, about how the ICU (International Cycling Union) and the IOC had met to discuss whether the cycling body should ‘take charge’ of skateboarding’s progress in a future Olympic Games, I was naturally intrigued.
The reason I was interested has a lot to do with a question that has come up frequently while I’ve been writing these Olympic pieces for Transworld: ‘Why should I care?’ True, a lot of people have been supportive of the articles and the idea that snowboarders should stand up for themselves in the face of yet another silent takeover from FIS.
But equally, the entire issue seems to just piss a lot of snowboarders off. The gist of the argument is basically ‘Who cares? Snowboarding is about riding powder/hitting rails/wearing denim jackets and listening to heavy metal* with your mates, not any of this Olympic rubbish’. (*delete as applicable)
Probably true. But, um, why can’t you think snowboarding is the best laugh ever AND have an informed opinion on the Olympic stuff? I’ve quoted this a lot, but Ed Leigh put it well: “Feel free to take a head in the sand approach. But if you do, you forgo the right to complain or ever become cynical about how the sport you love has been poisoned and how great it used to be in the good old days. Because essentially, by taking that stance, you are complicit in its demise”.
For me, this is the main reason we should care. At the moments, the FIS tanks are on the snowboarding lawn – so what, we should just slip out the back, leave the door on the latch and invite them in to steal everything that isn’t nailed down while we all go off and slap each other on the backs about how core, legit and snowboardy we’re all being? Yep, way to take the long view everyone.
Say what you like about biathlon as a sport (although to be fair they do race around with guns), but when FIS came sniffing around those guys back in the 80s, they told them where they could stick their attempt to run their Olympic qualification. The result? Today they have some self respect as a community, they get to run it on their own terms, keep all the money for themselves and are the only ski discipline FIS aren’t in charge of. So FIS don’t run biathlon – who are skiers. But they do run snowboarding – who aren’t skiers. Can anyone tell me what’s fundamentally wrong with this picture?
There’s a wider issue at play too. If we don’t try and safeguard ‘our’ sports from the rapacious outside interests of corporations and sporting organisations that couldn’t give a flying one about anything other than money, who will? Make no mistake, outside eyes are watching the way that the snowboarding debacle unfolds, and that includes the IOC, who see in action sports a way of invigorating their events for the twenty first century. How we react now will set the tone for the way it goes in all our sports – skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, BMX - in the future and on the biggest platform of all.
All of which brings me back to the Reuters article I mentioned at the start of this blog. If you took that article at face value, here was yet another potential stitch up. Some of the quotes from Pat McQuaid, head of the UCI, didn’t sound too promising either, with him apparently saying ‘the UCI was willing to take the whole of skateboarding under their umbrella’. Could it really be happening in skateboarding as it had in snowboarding?
To find out more, I contacted the the formidable McQuaid himself to see if they knew about the whole mess that had been made of snowboarding’s Olympic transition, and whether lessons were being learned in the case of skateboarding.
So according to the Reuters article, the UCI and the IOC have had a meeting about the UCI running skateboarding at a future Olympic. Is that true?
No. No we haven’t had a conversation about that with the IOC. It’s been something that’s been discussed a little. You know we have BMX in the Olympics, since Beijing? it’s been a a big success. It’s been a big success with the UCI. The President of the French Federation says they have 20,000 license holders as a result. So a natural extension of that would be BMX freestyle. And a natural extension of BMX freestyle would be skateboarding. Both of them are interested in coming into the Olympic programme, and we’ve had discussions with representatives from both sports about that possibility. But that’s as far as it’s gone.
So who was it you spoke to in skateboarding?
Gary Ream from the International Skateboarding Federation. How far have the conversations gone? Well the conversations went fairly well. Skateboarding is further down the road, although BMX freestyle would obviously be more natural for the UCI because of BMX already being in there. Albeit that the two BMX disciplines are different communities. Nevertheless we could cope with that as we have different disciplines within the UCI – such as indoor and outdoor cycling. And if that happened and we were to be successful then possibly skateboarding could be considered. I mean, this has a lot to do with the IOC and the image of the Olympic Games. You’d need to ask the IOC, but my understanding is that they’re looking at what they need to do to update and bring about a more youthful image for the Olympic Games.
That would make sense – in the winter arena they’re going heavy on snowboarding and freestyle skiing right now.
Yes, and that’s been a success for them, for the disciplines as well. Albeit that the disciplines were reluctant to come in under the ski federation, but overall the IOC would see that as being successful, so you can see that they might be looking at how they could repeat the success of that in the summer programme as well. This would be one way of doing it. Bear in mind also that the IOC does have restriction under the Olympic Charter under the number of disciplines and athletes. So that does put a restraint on it, it means they can’t just bring in new sports willy-nilly. It’d be a decision of the Executive Board but they’d have restraints as well. It’d be a long term project, there’s no doubt about that.
So if the UCI got involved with skateboarding, would you look to work with existing grassroots skateboarding events or set up a new UCI run contest series ?
To be honest, we haven’t even got the far. In both discussions we’ve had with the BMX freestyle people and the skateboarding people, we do appreciate that there are big community and cultural differences between these sports and cycling. They’re different sports than ours. Most of ours are ‘first across the line’ things, while skateboarding and BMX freestyle would obviously be judged. So what they are scared of is that by coming into the UCI they would become very regulated and lose their creativity and what makes them unique as sports. We’ve discussed that with them and we think that’s something that could be sorted out. But we haven’t really spoken about structure or how it would be sorted out. At the moment, as I say, this is just a dialogue between all parties.
Are you aware of what is happening in snowboarding right now with the ski federation FIS being awarded control of the qualification process? A lot of snowboarders feel that those things you mention – creativity and culture – are in danger of being lost thanks to the way the whole thing is being handled by FIS right now.
Yes, we’re aware of it. When it comes to skateboarding – I mean, I’m a long way from being in their community myself. But we do understand their fears, and it’s something we would consciously try and make sure doesn’t happen in this case. We’d work and create a situation where they do have a lot more control over their own destiny and events in the Olympics and in the build up.
That’s good to hear
It always has to be. But make no mistake about it. The only way you’re going to get to the Olympic Games is by being part of an international federation or if your national Olympic Committee selects you. That’s enshrined in the Olympic charter and you’re not going to change that. The question for us would be – how best to do it so that it’s in everybody’s best interests. We wouldn’t want to interfere with the disciplines, how it evolves, the judging, and how they run the disciplines. It’s important they retain that freedom of expression. but if it’s well enough thought out, and well enough discussed in advance, then the UCI would be certainly interested in following this up.
Published at: 10:11 am - Thursday November 03 2011
Our guest blogger Hamish Duncan (@hambourine) ponders what the relentless march of snowboarding progression means to the public looking in, and whether it is at the expense of personal style and expression
This year’s Freeze was yet more proof that snowboarding has come a long, long way since the first ever London big air extravaganza in 1995. Back then, the likes of David Vincent and Jamie Lynn put down frontside 5s to a bemused Covent Garden crowd. Today, everything about snowboarding has advanced, with the technicality of the tricks, the overall presentation of the competition, prize money and sheer number of spectators testament to the strides in popularity snowboarding has made in just fifteen short years.
Even practise showcased just how big the level is these days, with most most riders locking straight into 9s before upping it with 10s, 12s and the-now standard double corks.
As an ex-rider, trick development is moving at a ruthless pace. One year you’re seeing double corks, the next it may be triple. But how sustainable is all this? Will we soon start to see quadruple corks? And what does mean for a key component of snowboarding personality: style, grace and personal expression?
To the untrained eye, represented by the vast public crowds watching the event, it must all be very confusing: a lot of spinning and people going upside down with a twist. But the question that keeps recurring in my mind is this: what are they taking away with them? What does snowboarding mean to them, and what are we doing to ensure they get the best representation?
At this point, it’s good to remember another side of snowboarding and what got you stoked on riding in the first place. Everybody remembers his or her first snowboard video. That whirring black screen, the tinny audio as the opener showcasing all the bangers kicks in. Your favourite section that you anticipate even before it begins. A certain trick that gives you goose bumps for the sheer style and glory of its execution. Maybe I’m going too far. But there was something you took away that meant more than a prize cheque, more than just a medal.
This is a time when our sport is entering a new era. Snowboarding version 2.0. Or maybe it’s already Snowboarding 3.0. But to my mind, we still haven’t defined what the legacy of our sport to the outside world will really be, and what spectators at the likes of Freeze will take away with them. Are we a sport based on the advancement of tricks to stratospheric levels? Are we creating performance machines based upon a narrow-minded judging system? But more importantly, why are we unique from other sports?
Maybe one day we’ll see the inclusion of a style statement heat, giving the riders a chance to showcase a trick under a 540º rotation that says everything about your character. A super-sized no-grab backside 1 or a floated switch backside 5, tweaked to within an inch of it’s life. Something that sums up what snowboarding is in a competitive environment. Perhaps we have to lose our identity to remember exactly what we need to showcase. The glory, magnificence and great beauty of what snowboarding can be.
Thanks to @Scott_McMorris for inspiring this post with a conversation we had at Freeze.
Tourist boards have a pretty cool job: they have to make their destination look so good you’ll instantly book a holiday there.
Early attempts were simple, beautiful poster images, that are still highly prized.
The recipe seemed too easy to mess up: get a creative agency in to use their best artists and typesetters to do the job properly. Though, in fairness, some didn’t work as well for the English market. Ahem.
Film was a natural medium for tourist boards, and while early attempts in the 1950s were pretty crude, their general premise was right: show the place, meet the people, and highlight the beautiful countryside, as this short Pathe film on Wales demonstrates – although the line about the people being “obstinately Welsh” could have been dropped.
Then came the brochure, with lovely big pictures, full of groups of people WHO LOOK LIKE YOU having a right old time.
It’s at this point of course that something went wrong. Because as tourism grew and the budgets expanded, the creativity went out of the window. In place of cool images and artists impressions we got cheesy photos and corporate videos. Maybe it was the middle management, or the fact that campaigns got designed by committee. Either way, by the turn of the millennium, this became the default setting for all tourism output:
Don’t get me wrong, I love Portugal. But this short film makes it look about as exciting as a mortgage conference. The corporate video formula is all there. Enya soundtrack? Check. Slow-mo heli shots? Check. Have we got the cheapo voice-over man’s mic on full reverb? Check.
And who wrote the script? “There is a country of friendly, inhospitable people. A country of contrasts” (at 0:18) – Friendly AND INHOSPITABLE”? Really? Could this whole approach just be lazy thinking, thinking a quick overdub or dodgy translation makes a film clearly designed for the Euro market acceptable for the English-speaking market? After all, even the biggest companies are guilty of that, as this recent Fernando Alonso Fiat 500 farrago ad demonstrates.
*Sigh* But there is hope. By going back to using small, creative agencies, some forward-thinking tourist boards have once again used the destination’s best assets – the scenery, the people, the experiences – in a credible, creative way. Like who? We blogged recently about the brilliant Visit Iceland film and the successful Eat, Move and Learn virals, but here are a couple more that we like.
First up is Visit Finland, whose new film showcases the Northern Lights using a simple – but hugely effective – timelapse.
And while we’re on the subject of timelapses, doesn’t this incredible film from Tenerife just make you wanna hop on a plane there?
And props must be given to the low-budget film We Love Bikes made by Danish tourist office Wonderful Copenhagen
The advantages of letting an agency come in should be obvious: outsiders can see your best assets, they can take a brief and add a creative edge, and they can talk directly to certain markets in a way that might be otherwise impossible (or hit and miss at best). Do it right and you’ve got a potentially viral film on your hands, with millions clicking to see your destination as the Iceland and Eat, Move, Learn films prove.
Do it wrong, and you might make it onto the dreaded Titanic Travel Awards website, which celebrates the worst of all online travel sites.
Or – even worse – your film could end up in the next International Committee of Tourist Film Festivals “Grand Prix” award, as Segovia Tourism’s high-budget, Enya-soundtracked winner from last year proves. It’s had 45 views since.
I still haven’t seen the Art of Flight. I’m waiting for the big screen. And, I’ll be honest, there’s some student-like, throwback part of me that wants to see it long after the hype has died down. At the moment (and I’m aware this probably says something slightly sad about me), I’ve been more interested in the frankly awesome scale of the marketing that has gone into the project.
As we know, this is the most expensive snowboarding film ever made and, as Melissa Larssen points out in this review of the film for ESPN.com, that has polarised opinion among the core community. For every rabid grommet frothing at the prospect of all that cash being spunked on screen, there’s an old-timer complaining it’s being overhyped and overproduced in the manner of Sky Sports’s weekly ‘Super Incredible Football Sunday. And it’s live!!!!!’ extravaganzas.
Having not seen it, I’m not really in a position to comment. But whatever your thoughts on the film itself, which has generally been very well received (as these fairly typical reviews in Whitelines and Snowboarder demonstrate), it’s hard to argue that the on-screen expense and creativity on display has been more than matched by the creativity involved in the marketing strategy.
As well as the usual blanket coverage in the core snow media, which has been almost universally positive, and the carefully plotted and released teasers in the build up to the film (the ‘Metal’ trailer was a nice touch) there has been some pretty impressive cross platform (ahem) ‘synergy’ going on as marketing types would say.
Anything else? How about the exclusive Justin Timberlake interview with Travis Rice on Timbo’s own website? Hell, JT even turned up at the New York premiere (see above), thus garnering even more publicity. And that Asymbol Gallery that is promoting both the book and the screen prints? That would be owned by….none other than Travis Rice.
And it’s interesting to draw a parallel between snowboarding’s other standalone superstar right now, Shaun White, and the two differing approaches. Here you have the two most high profile and possibly talented guys in the snowboarding world. But their standing with their core community could not be any more different. On the one hand, Travis Rice manages to make the most expensive snowboarding film ever, with possibly the most sophisticated marketing angle ever (again – Justin Timberlake?), and comes out of it looking more core than ever. Whereas Shaun White makes a comedy chewing gum commercial and gets absolutely caned for it.
Turns out Travis is as forward-thinking off the screen as he is on a board.
Published at: 03:09 pm - Tuesday September 20 2011
One of the big stories doing the rounds last week concerned the cancellation of Groundswell Festival, which had been due to take place in the French surfing town of Hossegor last weekend. When the main investor pulled out at the last minute, the festival was cancelled. The festival organisers had expected 15,000 festival goers to pass through their gates but with only 4,000 tickets sold it meant the festival joined over 30 British festivals that also fell by the wayside this summer. That caused a pretty huge stir throughout the industry, and left a lot of punters and artists who’d travelled a long way to the festival pretty frustrated.
These words come straight from the press release issued by event organisers, Allez – Oop: “Without the support of our investor the financial damage to all the suppliers working on Groundswell would have been much greater after the event than if we stopped now.” Read the whole press release here.
And that would have been that, another familiar story of festival disappointment, if it hadn’t been for the efforts of a small bunch of guys from the Hossegor area, and a handful of artists from the Groundswell line-up. This crew got together to put on a show that meant those 4,000-odd suddenly ticketless festival goers didn’t travel all the way for nothing.
Donavon Frankenreiter, Ben Howard, Mat McHugh and Rich Thomas were four of the artists who stayed to entertain the crowd at the newly named ‘For The Love’ festival which took place in the Salles de Bourdaines, a large hall near to a bar called Le Surfing. Woodie Bouma runs Le Surfing and we had a chat with Woodie who co-organised ‘For The Love’ to try and re-coup some of the money local businesses and the artists had lost: “It was really one of those ‘one drop sent the ripples sailing’ kind of things…there was so much positive energy from people to make this happen…it’s amazing!”
Ben Howard, one of the artists, has become an integral part of the surf scene in the last couple of years, thanks largely to his track, Cloud 9, which was the title track in Kelly Slater’s film of the same name. Ben’s manager and close friend Owain Davies helped Woodie put the festival together and he took a minute out to tell us about his hectic week.
“Everything started to fall together after a lot of hard work, and with Woodie and his army it was always going to happen. We had 1400 people come through the doors, and while I was busy organising everything, Ben had the best surf he’s ever had in France.”
As mentioned before, the Groundswell festival hasn’t been the only festival casualty of the summer, with over 30 British festivals also having the plug pulled on them. It’s believed the reason behind the decline in the festival scene is down to an over-saturation of the market, meaning that people just simply have too many to choose from. With smaller festivals not managing to sell their minimum quota of tickets they’re forced into cancelling the show. It’s not only smaller festivals feeling the pinch either. Bigger festivals are opening their doors, but to smaller crowds than in previous years. Read this Guardian story to get a bigger picture of the state of the British festival industry.
After chatting with a few of the locals, it sounds as though for once this familiar bad-taste-in-mouth festival cancellation story had a happy ending, with ‘For The Love’ going down swimmingly with all those die-hard surf music fans who hung around for the weekend. When we first heard about the impromptu gig being put on in place of the festival, we pictured a small venue, possibly even a bar. So, when we got the pictures through from the festival we were blown away by what a good effort the lads down in Hossegor made to go ahead with this festival and for this we truly doff our caps to them.
Groundswell’s mission statement was to put on a festival that would “celebrate the very essence of surf lifestlye”. For whatever reason, they didn’t manage to pull this off. So there’s something a little heartwarming about the fact that a last-minute crew, fired by that very surfing culture the original festival sought to celebrate, did manage to pull something like this off.
Cheers to Tom Greenhill for the images.
Every day brings new evidence that action sports are becoming bigger than ever. This week’s news that VF Corp, the company that owns Vans, purchased Timberland is arguably the most mind-blowing indication yet. Bob Dylan was right: the times they are a changin’.
Thirty years ago, this news would have been greeted with disbelief, but today it barely even warranted a mention in the industry press, with OnBoard, Whitelines, Transworld Business and Transworld Snowboarding all leaving the acquisition off their news pages. This may be down to a number of reasons. Maybe they didn’t find it newsworthy. Or maybe they didn’t even receive the press release. But the most likely explanation is that the industry has changed so drastically in the last fifteen years that such previously industry-shaking news has become positively routine.
The signs are everywhere. Today, universities offer not only courses, but whole degrees based around action sports content: in both Surf Science and Extreme Sports Management. It’s another sign of how society is striving to keep up with the growing demand for action sports to be integrated into everyday life.
Run the numbers and it is easy to understand why: more people are participating in action sports than ever before. This BBC story from last year suggests the number of people participating in the top five extreme sports in the USA to be over 40 million, with skateboarding finishing second behind mountain biking. The BBC even goes as far as to suggest that action sports managed to swerve the killer-downturn of the late naughties thanks to the fact that those who invest in it invest in the lifestyle and see it maybe as a necessity instead of a passing trend, therefore increasing customer loyalty. So it’s official: action sports are recession proof as well.
To get an idea of just how huge action sports are becoming just take a look at Nike. The sports giant started their action sports division SB in an attempt to enter the skateboarding market almost a decade ago. With the introduction of Nike 6.0 in 2005 – aimed at the rest of the action sports market – 6.0 and SB combined are now the fastest growing division at Nike and they expect to double their $390 million business by 2015.
With a global leader like Nike showing their determination and interest in the action sports industry it’s clear to see that this industry is now the biggest of business. Volcom’s recent sale to luxury French company PPR (owners of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent) highlights the way in which big brands now need to align themselves with action sports.
Which brings us back to VFC and Timberland. Fashions come and go, and maybe the big-wigs over at VF Corps know something that we don’t. Maybe next season’s skate shoe will be pay homage to the likes of Kyle James, seen above ripping Brooklyn a new one in a pair of ‘Timbs’ back in ’97. Far fetched? One thing is for certain: these are strange and new times for action sports.
The Olympic slopestyle brouhaha and the consistent dissing the ASP has been getting in recent weeks, among other things, has got us thinking about the future for competitive freesports here at ACM Towers. Namely, how is that future going to unfold?
Clearly, our sports are massive like never before. But a fundamental problem must be solved if they are ever going to make the leap across the remaining chasm between core and mainstream: how to tweak formats in a way that all camps – athletes, core spectators and mainstream onlookers, who will only ever turn on a couple of times a year – will understand and appreciate?
The cry from the core camp is always the same. ‘Why should I care? It won’t change the way I enjoy skating/snowboarding/surfing’. Very true – and not just for this sport. After all, if video goal line technology is introduced in football to tweak the format of the professional game, it will have very little effect on how things go down at my weekly Wednesday five-a-side. But change happens anyway. And our sports are no different.
One key difference between football and, say, snowboarding, is the difference in how easy both sports are to understand. Point a camera at a football pitch, or show somebody the highlight of a game like the Germany v Italy semi final at the World Cup in 2006, and it’s fair to say that someone who had never seen the sport before could get caught up in the drama and sporting theatre. That’s not quite the case with action sports, the intricacies of which can take years to understand and appreciate. Hell, even seasoned observers get the trick names wrong.
And that’s one of the major obstacles action sports face before they can achieve true mainstream acceptance. Witness the half pipe at the last Winter Olympics. Much of the hype around that event, particularly in the media, centred around personalities, and pundits repeatedly telling the uninitiated how hard and dangerous tricks like double corks are. And it worked, in a way. Even my Mum had an opinion on the double cork by the time Shaun White stepped onto the podium. But as a means of maintaining interest in the sport, is it not particularly sustainable. At some point, punters are going to have to get what is going on if they are ever going to turn on their TVs in large numbers.
So what’s the solution? It’s a debate that is being played out right now across action sports, as event organisers experiment with formats and judging to try and achieve this delicate balance. TV is certainly the main driving force behind this effort. Rumours have been swirling for months that the only reason slopestyle has been fast tracked into Sochi 2014 is at the behest of NBC, the TV company that control the rights to the Winter Olympics. It also explains the success of the X-Games, at an event that has clearly been designed to look good on TV first and foremost. Incidentally, I also heard an interesting anecdote from Ed Leigh recently about how the only snowboarding event the BBC will touch for Ski Sunday is the Air and Style – purely because they feel it’s the only event where the production levels are high enough. Take a look at the footage above to see what you think.
Looked at from this perspective, the IOC’s preference to work with FIS on snowboarding makes a kind of sense. FIS might not have been running snowboarding contests very long, but they have certainly been running large scale, TV-friendly ski comps for a very long time indeed.
So what all that in mind, it’s interesting to speculate how things will turn out. In snowboarding, all eyes will understandably be on the World Snowboarding Championships in Oslo next February. Run by the people behind the TTR, who have been protesting the most loudly against the FIS monopoly on snowboarding at the Olympics, it is surely going to be a competition that reflects their vision of how such events should be run. In surfing, the Quik Pro in New York is surely another effort to take the sport to the masses. After all that town has waves, but it would’t be for first choice to run a contest if waves were the sole priority.
And what about skateboarding? it might not be an Olympic sport yet (or ever, to the relief of most skaters), but events like the Street League and the recent Maloof Money Cup (above) are probably the most innovative examples of yet of an action sport attempting to package their complex offering for both audiences.
In truth, we’ve got no idea how this will turn out. It’s a story that will run as long as these sports exist. One thing is for sure: better this evolution is in the hands of those with the knowledge and expertise to truly do justice to their passions, than those solely attracted by the cash and opportunities suddenly on offer. Need a reason why you should care? There’s one.
Published at: 10:09 am - Thursday September 01 2011
All was going well. Several of the office guys had got back into skating, and with a few more friends from Brighton we’d started to visit the nearby skateparks: Cuckfield, Crawley, Shoreham Bowl, and Angerming. Yeah we weren’t the Bones Brigade, but we were having fun cruising around the concrete bowls, and riding the mini ramp transitions. Grinds were being thrown down again, frontside rocks being dished out, and even the odd blunt was landed. Not by me I should add.
True, we weren’t exactly spring chickens (on one trip to Unit One in Rochester we worked out the combined age in the car was 180 years old), but we weren’t the oldest guys in the parks either. I even pitched the older skater story to the Telegraph, based on the idea that the rebirth of skating was creating a Rad Dad phenomenon, where older guys were hitting the skateparks again with their kids.
They commissioned the piece, so I went on the Middle Aged Shred forum to find dads and kids who fitted the bill. My post aroused a fair bit of suspicion but that was understandable, given the bad press skating often gets. In fact given the bad press that action sports in general get. But by me? Never. I ride boards, I know how these sports should be broadcast. I don’t take the piss.
And then a disastrous month. Firstly, Lucozade decided to shoot a skateboarding advert down the very roads some of our crew use to get to the office (meaning from then on, passers by would think we’re buying into a fizzy drinks-based lifestyle. Oh, the shame of it).
And then the Telegraph piece came out. I got a mixed reception from the Middle Aged Shred website forum, with one person even suggesting they should all “just spam the fucker” – ie: me – when the Telegraph editor decided to hold the piece back for a week. Such anger, about a skateboarding article being a week late.
And the worst thing of all? When the article did finally did come out, I had to read it from my hospital bed, because in the intervening week, I hung up on the coping at Crawley skatepark and fractured my hip. The result? This little lot 9below) holding my femur together, and months of physio and rehab till I”m back skating again.
Skateboarding is amazing, but it’s a fickle mistress. And if you’re 30+, get some pads yeah?
