Here at ACM, we are proper board sports history geeks. So it was with no small measure of chin-stroking delight that I found myself in Vail’s Colorado Ski Museum (skimuseum.net) the other night. The place tells the story of skiing in Colorado, but also has a section dedicated to the history of snowboarding, and what [...]
In hindsight, a curt tweet publicly admonishing Jamie Nicholls for bad language wasn’t the best way for new BSS Performance Director Paddy Mortimer to introduce himself to the UK snowboarding community. These days, it’s never been easier to whip up a Twitchfork-wielding mob, and the digital response from the UK scene was predictable. Soon, everyone [...]
The action sports world is a tough place to be right now. Snowboard retailers report that winter clothing sales are down after another topsy turvy winter weather pattern in both Europe and the US, and as the ‘worst recession since the 1930′s depression’ continues, liftpass sales are down, ever more seasonaires are choosing to ski, [...]
Occasionally, a work or an artist comes along that is so influential, so inescapable that anything that comes after can’t help but reference it, intentionally or not. Think about how, after The Matrix, every ad on TV seemed to use that same timeslice technique. Or how, after the Strokes, the world drowned in a surfeit [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The new Art of Flight trailer doesn’t mess about. The film looks like its going to be great. But I think I’m suffering from a surfeit of slow motion, an excess of everything being ridiculously slooooowed-down and lovingly rendered in super soporific HD (TM). This seems to be everywhere in most sport coverage at the [...]