this ran wednesday in the post. thankfully my dad reads the paper everyday. mr. meyers, please die already and spare us from your uneducated and uninformed articles about the 'future' of the ski industry, how freeskiing is so 'boring' to watch, and that if you in the terrain park it automatically means you won't be able to ski any more after age 20. enjoy.
Freeskiing needs its race roots
By John Meyer
Denver Post Staff Writer
My column last week about the freeskiing movement and moronic comments made by freeskier Tanner Hall, who belittled ski racing and predicted its demise, generated a deluge of entertaining e-mails.
Many complained it was unfair to stereotype an entire movement because of one foul-mouthed high school dropout. Hall has his fans, but a lot of the freeriders who sent me angry e-mails called him a spoiled brat who should not be considered representative of their sport.
Some said I obviously know nothing about freeskiing. I admit I don't know a lot about it, because I can't watch for long without my eyes glazing over.
Not that there's anything wrong with it.
I thought it would be a good idea to learn more, so I talked to Vail's Chris Anthony, a big-mountain freeskier who has appeared in several Warren Miller films and has competed in freeskiing competitions.
Anthony already had heard about Hall's idiotic remarks, and he said they made him shake, he was so angry. He said World Cup downhiller Daron Rahlves has more talent in his little finger than Hall has in his entire body.
Right away I knew Anthony was just the expert I needed to educate me about the freeskiing movement.
'Tanner Hall has taken an aspect of our sport that he found comfortable and he redefined it,' Anthony said as we watched World Cup races over the weekend at Beaver Creek. 'He has pushed it and made it drive an interest in skiing that's good for the entire industry, but it's one small part of it. By the comments he said, he just doesn't understand the rest of it.'
I suppose there is some 13-year-old out there the freeskiers would nominate as a better spokesman for their movement, but they need to hear what Anthony has to say.
Anthony started out as a freestyle skier, switched to ski racing and made the U.S. development team. He got one World Cup start, racing in a downhill at Aspen in 1987. He went to college and then got involved with the extreme-skiing movement, progressing with the sport into big-mountain freeriding.
'Everything I've done, all the first descents, dropping from helicopters, even the big, huge cliff drops, nothing compares to being in the start of a gnarly downhill that's covered in ice, that you're going to be hurling yourself down on the edge of your ability,' Anthony said. 'If you want to win, you're on the edge of everything you have, hanging onto this millimeter of metal that's between you and the ground, skipping over the snow at 90 mph.'
Anthony says the freeskiing movement - terrain parks, rails, big-mountain skiing - has been great for the sport, and he concedes some of the tricks are amazing.
'But there's no doubt the most finely tuned athletes in our sport are these World Cup racers,' Anthony said. 'What Bode Miller is doing on skis right now is beyond what the rest of the field is even thinking. It's unbelievable.'
Many of the top big-mountain skiers came from ski racing backgrounds, which taught them discipline and the fundamentals of skiing technique. Anthony says many of the kids in the freeskiing movement aren't learning those fundamentals.
'You've got guys in terrain parks going off table tops and halfpipes; it's amazing what they're doing,' Anthony said. 'But where does that take them when they're past 20 years old if they didn't learn how to carve a turn, or they didn't learn how to absorb bumps, how to pivot into a bump? Yeah, they can ride the rails, they can do a backflip, but put them on an icy slope, they can't carve a turn to save their lives.'
Ski racing hasn't been promoted nearly as well as freeskiing in recent years. With Miller, Rahlves and Vail's Lindsey Kildow winning regularly on the World Cup, it's crucial the U.S. ski industry do more to make them known.
It won't be easy, because they race in the United States only once a year, spending the rest of the winter in Europe, and because it's so hard to follow them on television. The Beaver Creek downhill, held Friday, was televised Sunday on NBC. The other three Beaver Creek races will be shown on the Outdoor Life Network the next three Saturdays. The men will have raced eight times in Europe over that time period.
'Skiing in the U.S. unfortunately is so focused on freestyle, the X Games, all that stuff,' Rahlves said. 'It's exposed so much. We need to race here more; we need to have people on the hill close to the action, to see what's going on.'
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'That's what Punk is to me. The near final understanding that the world is ours, and that we only have to realize it to make it so.'
-Ben Bormann
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