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 [...]
UCI President Pat McQuaid 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
For most people the most fascinating aspect of the recent News International phone hacking scandal is what it has revealed about the reality of how the press works, and the somewhat murky relationship between big business, the media and the world of PR. It was a peep behind the curtain, and no mistake. As something [...]
For all of the rubbish crime, horror and romance novels that are written every year there are those books that, when you get past the cover, are beautifully written accounts of modern life. Life, which let’s face it, is not that easy at the moment. This week, the longlist for the Man Booker prize was [...]
I was at the Whitelines offices recently, chatting to editor Ed Blomfield about the announcement of slopestyle in the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Instinctively, I think it’s a bad move. But I’m also aware that many snowboarders think otherwise, or simply don’t really care. And I can understand why. Most people if asked would say that [...]
Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo. The tourist promotional video is one of the oldest tricks in the film case. Get it right and the tourists come thick and fast, spending their hard earned tourist dollars with reckless abandon. Get it wrong and a country’s reputation is besmirched and government money [...]
In this recent blog my colleague Ben Mondy wrote about how we get bombarded by PRs looking to get mainstream coverage for their one-off event, or mid-level athlete who happens to be in Britain. Ben pointed out that for many action sports brands – or adventure travel brands – trying to get column inches using [...]
PURE BRONTE from Marcus O'Brien on Vimeo. Homesickness is a funny thing. Hard to describe, harder to capture. It’s a constant nag that tugs away as an unrelenting background force. Watching this video, though, sure brought the abstract pang of homesickness into short, sharp focus. As background, last week saw a seven day run of [...]