It was an amazing a fun night, and an honour to be on the panel with three amazingly passionate people. Magee is preparing a full report but here is my prepared statement. Truth be told it was the freestyle Q&A part of the night that was the most fun and, I think, interesting.
The motion before us is "This house believes the snowboard industry has sold out".
When first approached to debate the favorable side of this motion I was a bit hesitant. Although it’s always fun to talk a bit of shit, I hate to talk down my beloved sport too much. But as I looked a bit more into it, a very important distinction was pointed out. It’s not Snowboarding itself that we are talking about here, rather the “Industry” that has been built up around it. Now there’s an easy topic to get a bit riled up about.
To figure out if the Industry has sold out, I thought it was important to properly define a time when it hadn’t yet sold out. The best approximation of that I could come up with was an unspecified time back in the 80s and 90s when the sport had grown enough to have actually created something worth being deemed an Industry - but at the same time most of the companies were still rider-owned and operated and conducted themselves in a manner more fitting of, maybe a touring rock band then a for-profit business. It seems like it was really the “good old days” after that first big grown spurt, once the world was starting to take notice of our dear little sport and there was starting to be a bit of actual money being spread around, but no one knew any better yet to take anything remotely seriously. Magazines were filled with exotic tales of travel to far off places and there was always some crazy new trick being inverted to try the next weekend up at the hill. Personally I was just a teenager getting into the sport and wasn’t particularly paying attention to the business side of things, but it definitely seemed like there was a ton of support being put behind the riders and basically all anyone wanted to do was have fun.
And of course this is what drew so many of us to the sport.
And that brings me to my main point. These days the stakes have been raised so high - with literally billions of dollars resting on the success or failure of a single snow-year - that these surfwear and energy drink companies who have somehow become the financial backbone of our sport can now no longer take the risk of spending advertising dollars on a rider who may be a little too edgy or a little too out-there for the general viewing public. And what’s ended up happening because of that is we’ve been left with a situation where there is some real serious money and support being thrown behind the absolute best of the best but absolutely nothing left over to help bring up the “middle-class” of snowboarding professionals... the working-class snowboarder who’s video parts fuels the next generation of shreds, the ones out there day-in and day-out getting it done in because they couldn’t imagine it any other way.
I mean fuck. There’s something wrong with a situation where Seb Toots & Travis Rice are making literally seven figures a year yet my boy Dave Short, arguably one of Canada’s top big-mountain riders is forced to pay for sled gas out of the salary for the full-time job he was forced to take. And that’s not to take anything away from the top dogs like Seb and Travis. They are two of the top snowboarders in history and rightly deserved to be treated like royalty. We need to make sure we are supporting all aspects of snowboarding, not just the one that happens to be hot at the moment. Where is the love for the rest of the riders? The ones who a five thousand dollar travel budget or a winter of monthly rent checks would make an absolute world of difference. The Andrew Burns’ and the Claudia Avon’s. We need these guys and girls to keep filling up the pages of our beloved snowboard magazines with truly innovated riding. To keep feeding us video parts that make our skin crawl not because of how many helicopters they were filmed with - as great as that is in a whole other way - but because we know the blood, sweat and tears that went into producing those shots. And what’s more? It’s there guys who are stoking out the next generation of shredders, the grom who is still so fucking stoked on snowboarding that he can’t stop thinking about it. Who tears pages out of magazines and posts them on their bedroom walls.
The way our involvement in the olympics has played out? The involvement of energy drink companies? Some days it feels like we’re really walking a fine line.
As far as I’m concerned, the “snowboard industry” can go fuck itself. The companies who are in it for the right reasons will always be rewarded and karma can be a bitch to all those who are not. There’s good and bad to every situation, it’s up to everyone to make their own judgement call on whether they’re down with Redbull or Fiat being the title sponsor of a snowboard event but what I can tell you is this:
24 winters after first strapping into a Black Snow snowboard on an icy hill in Quebec, I’m still as stoked as ever on this fucked up sport. It has shaped my life, my friends, where I live, what I do for a living and so much more. No matter what is happening in the so-called Industry, you can never take away the simple joy of a fresh pow turn and that is why the snowboarding Industry will never own Snowboarding.
Thank you.
So, what do you think?
Share This Article on Facebook!
