© Christian Pondella/Red Bull Photofiles
Why Freeskiing is the Next Snowboarding
Nov 01 2006 / Los Angeles, CA“Necessity is the mother of invention.” – Plato
Back before “new school” and the amped early days of “freeskiing,” skiing suffered through a dead period in the early and mid-1990s. So uncouth was the sport that skiers weren’t even invited to the first ESPN Winter X Games, in 1997, at Snow Summit, Calif. (while ice climbers, snow mountain bikers, and super-modified shovel racers were.) Worse yet, every year skiers saw mass desertions from their ranks to snowboarding.
“The thing I realized at the time was that something had to happen,” recalls 1998 Olympic gold medalist in mogul skiing Jonny Moseley, 31, of Tiburon, Calif. “Skiing was really, really stagnant and tricks were becoming redundant while snowboarding was progressing. Of all my friends, by eighth grade I was the only one still skiing — everyone else was snowboarding.”
Then skiing blew up, with innovations in equipment and style begetting ever more innovation. A universal phenomena akin to the Big Bang, the birth of freeskiing re-energized the sport on all fronts, forever changing its face and form. New school off-axis rotations provided Michael Jordan-esque silhouettes for mass media consumption; the adoption of larger skis in the big mountains facilitated true surf-style (and, sure, snowboard-style) descents; and then the wholly mind-bending concept of “switch,” or backwards, capabilities and twin tip skis flipped things upside down and backwards and full-circle all over again. And still it was only 2002 when the X Games featured its first skier superpipe event and finally evolved the one-hit wonder skiing “big air” event into slopestyle.
For a modern-day example, take the Alta, Utah-dishwasher-turned-freeskiing-Jedi Sage Cattabriga-Alosa throwing tricks of the park and pipe variety while descending committing, big-mountain backcountry terrain as small avalanches cloud his peripheral vision. If that’s freeskiing today — or at least one of its incarnations — it took nearly a decade of pioneering to get there.
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“In 20 or 30 years, we’re gonna look back at the last decade — fat skis, twin tips, the development of the whole freeride movement, and styles changing drastically — and say that period saw really dramatic change for the better, and how lucky we were to be there when it was happening,” says big mountain freeskiing (and fat ski design) pioneer Shane McConkey, 36, of Olympic Valley, Calif. “It’s pretty cool, actually. And to think just a couple of years ago people were talking about how snowboarding was going to take over. How skiing was going to go away. Well, not anymore.”
One night, in 1995, McConkey was sitting in a bar in Valdez, Alaska. Among the swillers, snowboarders greatly outnumbered skiers. All eyes were trained on a ski movie on the bar TV. “We’re watching this skier making methodical hop turns down a face. Then a snowboarder stands up and goes, ‘Gawd… Open it up man! Just let it go!’” says McConkey.
“And it was true… That’s what turned me on to larger surface-area skis, and trying to figure out lines like snowboarders were doing. Pretty soon I was straight-lining too.”
In 1996, McConkey switched to a larger ski permanently (first the Volant Chub, which, at 90 mm under foot, is now slender among fats). He’s since pioneered designs for reverse camber skis — deep-powder specialty items — like the Volant Spatula and now the K2 Pontoon (130 mm at the waist).
The trend? Skis got bigger and more shapely — and better, according to everyone, from racers to recreationalists. And the term freeskiing? “All of us would laugh at the term ‘extreme skiing,’ because it was more embellished than accurate,” says McConkey, one of the founders of the International Free Skiers Association (IFSA), the sanctioning-body for big mountain competitions (which, oddly, are still known sometimes as extreme contests). “So we started calling it freeskiing. And that’s what it’s all about — doing it your own way and showing off your own creativity.”
When Jonny Moseley won the 1998 Olympic gold medal in moguls, it wasn’t his moguls prowess alone that clinched it. What put him over the top was the 360 mute grab — a totally new trick in the eyes of the masses. Today, the 360 mute grab is regarded as the keystone trick to the new school universe — with its tweaked out grab and slow-floating casual-like rotation serving as hallmarks of the style.
“But I don’t take credit for inventing it,” says Moseley, who is currently enrolled at UC-Berkeley fulltime pursuing a BA in American Studies, pointing to the likes of JP Auclair and JF Cusson, two of the legendary freeskiing crew known as the New Canadian Air Force, and others.
“People had been grabbing their skis for a while, and that’s a good question — who was the first? I don’t know. But adding the 360 was sort of the next step. And I don’t know where it really first started — I must’ve seen JP or JF do it first… But we all started incorporating it into our mogul runs at the same time. I just happened to be the one who took it center-stage to the Olympics, put the whole package together.”
“The movement would’ve definitely surfaced somewhere else, but I guess I gave it a kick in the ass,” says Moseley.
Nonetheless, the 360 mute grab was a shot heard and seen round the world. And freeskiing had a silhouette to go with its brand.
The likes of JP Auclair and JF Cusson were soon onto the next big thing: switch. While they were mastering it with twin tip skis, Moseley was in the dark. He was introduced to switch, like most everyone else, at the X Games less than a year after his gold medal. “I didn’t even have twin tips at the time,” Moseley chuckles.
“But that was truly a moment in time. In less than a year we went from the 360 mute grab to off-axis rotations to switch. And everything was basically set at that point,” Moseley says.
Peter Olenick, a 22-year-old pro freeskier from Carbondale, Colo., was an impressionable teenager at the time. “Switch, yeah, it was like, ‘Whoaaaa. Never seen anyone do something like that before. May I try’?” he says.
“Naw, but that’s when it occurred to me that something really different was happening out there. It really inspired me,” continues Olenick, a double medalist at the 2004 Winter X Games.
Skiing only gained equal footing with snowboarding at the X Games in 2002, when the “big air” contest for skiers shifted to slopestyle — a pillar event for snowboarders — and skiers were finally ushered into the superpipe as well. Tanner Hall, originally from Kalispell, Mont., handled the transition with ease, winning four consecutive golds from 2001 to 2004 in the big air/slopestyle (to go with three medals in the pipe to date).
But 2002, with skiers like CR Johnson of California and Candide Thovex of France catching more than 20 feet of air out of the pipe, it was something to behold. Even for snowboarders. “That was sick,” says Aspen’s Travis McLain, 26, a former World Cup snowboard racer and freerider with an X Games gold medal to his name, who is also an X Games commentator and a budding freeskier. “Those guys were boosting. Just seeing how hard they carved the pipe, how fast they were going into the hits. Hell, I’d never seen skiers go that big before. Some skiers probably go bigger than the biggest snowboarders nowadays.”
“So what’s next?” says McConkey with a laugh. “Well, that’s the million dollar question.” For Moseley, he’s seen it already. “I’ve been impressed with the progression of tricks over the years, but I just saw [Sweden’s] Jon Olsson doing a double flat-spin 540, which I could’ve never imagined happening. It really ends up being a 900. That’s a big, big step…”
And the sport continues to splinter and innovate in all directions. Telemark skiers are pulling switch moves in the backcountry and the park, and twin tips are seeing new applications in truly extreme terrain, as evidenced by a video circulating on the Internet showing the late Doug Coombs riding switch on rappel down blue-ice crux sections in a couloir off the Grand Teton.
And X Games medalist and one of the top freeskiing competitiors, Peter Olenick, takes a pragmatic view of the road ahead. “Pretty much every year I’m like, ‘Aw, I don’t know much farther it can progress.’ And then somebody will do something totally nuts, and I’m like, ‘Right on, there it goes again.” And so it goes.
- Tim Mutrie
