On Snowboarding and The Joy of the Subculture
One of the most stylish and classic moves in snowboarding is known, perhaps a bit unstylishly, as a bonk. The rider drops in, gathers speed, leaves the edge of the jump and the surface of this earth, and then, in midair, taps the edge of his or her board against a foreign object, often spinning the rider off into open space. It looks as if the rider, casually unmoored from the concerns of mere land dwellers, reaches out and touches something solid, if only to reaffirm that they are still ultimately tethered to Earth.
Like many other extreme sports of the aughts, Snowboarding enjoyed an unprecedented amount of popularity amongst Americans and others around the world. The avatar of this popularity was undoubtedly Shaun White. In the back half of the decade, Shaun White was nearly invincible at the Olympics and other high profile events such as the X-games.
White was (and still is) an energetic, extremely dedicated rider whose talents and drive were not unrecognizable from those of Derek Jeter, LeBron James, or other successful athletes. He was, in short, a winner. I was in seventh grade when White took gold in the Turin Olympics, his first of two.
I grew up in the shadow of the San Juan mountains in Colorado, in a dusty little town not far from the Four Corners. My family made frequent pilgrimages to the nearest mountain, which was only about an hour away from my house. I grew up on a sled hill, but didn’t start snowboarding until I was in sixth grade. I did not reach competence until seventh grade. When I first started riding, it was because I had older siblings who rode and I wanted to ride like them. Following the heroics of Shaun White in the Olympics, I wanted to ride because the true potential of the sport had been revealed to me.
I became pretty good over the years at snowboarding, capable of riding most things, but I never transcended to the level of some of my friends, let alone Mr. White. What I did do, however, was become heavily invested and aware of the history and culture of snowboarding. My deepest period of interest with the sport lasted from the moment White finished his first Olympic victory lap in 2006, to the time he finished his second, in 2010.
If the bonk comes across as a nonchalant act (afterthought?) of weightlessness, the McTwist is perhaps closer to a savage sort of rocket science. It combines a mid-air inversion and one and a half spins, while inverted, to pull off, and even while the best ones have that sleepy effortlessness of the bonk, the nature of what the move requires breeds an awareness of the rider’s mastery of the choreography needed to pull it off. No other move, I think, quite captures the nonsensical ballet of snowboarding quite as well—a ballet performed by submitting to that most impersonal master, gravity, and allowing one’s self to hurl, often just on the edge of control, down a mountainside.
I found, in the way that all who invest themselves in a subculture find, a rich though insular world full of the awesome, the ridiculous, the tragic. And this subculture was everywhere that snowboarding was, even at, the “Mainstream” events such as the Olympics or the X-games.
Take the 2006 Olympics. The second place finisher at those games was one Danny Kass, a seemingly obscure athlete. Within the subculture, Kass was a huge figure, and a throwback snowboarder archetype. He was grungy, charismatic, and progressive rider who, along with all of his gleefully dirtbag friends, created one of the most respected and fun loving teams in the sport. The announcer for the halfpipe event at the Olympics (and most television events) was Todd Richards, himself a highly decorated rider and pioneer of the sport. Having helped advance the competition circuit in the nineties, Richards spent the 2000s as the sport’s Gabriel, heralding a new boom of explosive riding and progression that occurred in that decade.
There was so much more. Snowboarding is known to the wider world for the competitions like the halfpipe and more recently, slopestyle. The reach of the sport encompasses far more than the competitions. There is the skate-inspired streetstyle, which uses handrails, staircases, and even walls as its canvas. There are the big mountain riders, who use cornices, cliffs, and murderously steep ridges as so much playground equipment. There are the backcountry dwellers, who erect massive ramps to catapult themselves across gaps almost incomprehensible, in terrain little known or even imagined outside of winter sports circles.
Though ultimately an individual effort, each of these disciplines only exists because there is an extensive support system that underwrites and endeavors to bring forth the jumps, transportation, guides, and documentation necessary to achieve (and capture—If Devun Walsh falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it…) that moment of weightlessness. Snowboarding, like skiing, is ultimately a monastic pursuit, made up of young(ish) men and women who have more or less forsaken the everyday and who largely toil in obscurity to bring forth fleeting moments of literal and figurative uplift.
My high school experience was much like most people’s—Floods of hormones, the occasional encounter that turned out pretty good, several more that can still evince a wince, years after. Triumphs, tribulations, tests & grades, and on and on and on and on.
I think that when you first enter high school, you’re still too young to really be able to make it socially by yourself, and the incorporation into a group is a necessary adjustment in order to survive. I just didn’t feel like I belonged in the group that I had chosen, and there were long stretches of time where it felt like my presence was simply tolerated, not included. Again, I suspect that this is not much different from other people’s perceptions or experiences about high school.
My love of snowboarding grew in part out of this feeling, whether or not it was contrary to the actual reality of my situation. I felt enthralled and envious at the fearless exploits of the big mountainers like Gigi Ruf, Nicolas Muller, or the undisputed king of the big ones, Jeremy Jones. I was impressed with the layered coolness of riders like Travis Kennedy or Marc Frank Montoya, and others like them that rode down improvised ramps and onto frankly ridiculous handrail sets or off of walls that had no business being ridden on. Then there were the backcountry destroyers, from the artful work of an aging master named Devun Walsh to the gravity defying Jake Blauvelt. Perhaps the finest of these riders was Travis Rice, a Montanan who, as I will explain presently, did more for the progression of the sport in the four years that I lived and died with it than any other.
These disciplines were at one point united in one superteam—Think the Miami Heat or the Steinbrenner Yankee teams of the late nineties. Known as the forum 8, it was comprised of eight of the most legendary riders the sport had seen thus far. Led by a manic wizard named Peter Line, the team embodied the effortless, crusty cool of the culture as well as the extreme athleticism necessary to stick difficult moves. They were, and still are, in my mind, the closest to a realization of what snowboarding as both a sport and a culture can be.
The existence of a subculture—from punk to seapunk—is often defined by its opposition to or deviation from the mainstream. Anytime a broader audience tunes in, there is an existential moment for the subculture—more people are being exposed to and enjoying the things that the movement claims to have value, but the attention also cheapens that value. The worry, ultimately, is that the watering down of the purity of that culture will be sacrificed for mainstream appeal, also known by that well known oath, “Selling out.”
Snowboarding was no different. The 2000s brought the sport an unheard of amount of attention, and this attention caused a crisis of sorts. Many riders took issue with the nature and overexposure that contests brought. There was much hand-wringing about the practice of “Spin-to-Win.” This was a perception that in order to win contests, one was forced to adopt tricks with an increasing number of rotations, ultimately homogenizing the riders’ style and stilt the lifeblood of the sport, progression. Shaun White, because he was well known by America (and “corporate” sponsors, as a opposed to businesses created within the subculture), became a target within the community. From the moment he stepped off the podium in Turin in 2006, the anger towards White mounted.
He was consistently shut out or underrepresented (why cover him when all the mainstream press covers him, amirite?) in many of the culture’s media outlets, and, save for one year in his run of dominance, did not take rider of the year awards, though he was in the top ten almost every year. Even when he was included on the lists, the subtext for the accompanying article detailing his accomplishments for that year was, Ehh, he won some contests.
There were other challenges to White and everything in the movement that he became associated with. In 2008, a movie came out that changed everything. It was called That’s it, That’s All. It starred Travis Rice and a handpicked crew of riders known throughout the community for their progressive style. Shot in glorious high definition (the first one to be produced this way), the film was a perfect microcosm of snowboarding’s growing pains.
Rice had long been rising in the sport, and by 2008 had positioned himself as the anti-Shaun White—Conscious of the broader snowboarding culture, more available, perhaps just as cocky, but in a more recognizably snowboarder way. I had the feeling, watching him in the X-games one year, that Rice did contests, but only if he felt like it, not because he had sponsors or a coach telling him what to do. He had a wonderful no-fucks-given attitude about him. The other thing about Rice was that he was good. Really good. Really really good.
Rice’s signature move was, in the late 2000s, the double corkscrew (Double cork), an insane pyrotechnic of a move in which Rice inverted twice whilst spinning out anywhere from two to three whole rotations of his body. That the move was an original creation of snowboarding was significant, as was the fact that the rider who may or may not have been the first to perform the trick on camera was one of the most technically innovative riders of all time.
The movie plays as a coronation of Rice as the foremost guardian of the sport’s cultural and progressive legacy. The movie also works very hard to show that Rice’s claim to guardianship is deserved, and more importantly, that it is recognized by other riders who had, in previous eras, performed a similar role.
One of the best segments in the film features a rider by the name of Terje Haakonsen. Haakonsen was a rider who had been with the sport since the late eighties, and was a well known force within the snowboarding community. He invented the Haakon flip, a Mctwist with an added rotation, and in 1998, he boycotted the inaugural Olympic Halfpipe event because he disliked that skiing federations ultimately held power in the administration and operation of snowboarding events at the Olympics. That a rider of the caliber of Rice sought out the venerated Haakonsen and that Haakonsen rode with Rice signified much.
That same year, Rice hosted a contest unlike any other. The Quicksilver Natural Selection combined traditional elements of contests like jumps with the steep hills and deep powder normally associated with the backcountry. Despite the fact that almost all of the riders and judges got sick, the contest went down as a success. This is how you do contests.
I remember watching the movie for the first time in 2010, and while I was blown away by the film and artistry of the riders, it felt to me like it was too much of an attack on contest riders, and while Shaun White was not mentioned by name, his presence could be felt on the borders, just out of sight, as the prime example of everything that the “right” way of snowboarding (and by extension, Travis Rice and his friends) was not.
In 2010, Shaun White won the Olympic Gold again in Halfpipe. He debuted a new, never before seen trick, a Double Mctwist 1260, which was met by much of the snowboard community with indifference or outright hostility. White had created this trick by using a private halfpipe and foam pits. While the move was jaw dropping, it smacked to many as a sign of the increasing practices of an unwanted mainstream version of athleticism, in which a rider simply paid for better training and coaches and even computer modeling so as to achieve the best result. It was Frankenstein’s monster, or Ivan Drago’s workout regimen. Sure, it was a nice trick, but the process was so, so lame.
I stopped watching and following snowboarding after 2010 for a couple of reasons.
I mentioned earlier that group instinct is what gets you through those first couple of years of high school. I think that by the time you get to the back half, you’ve started developing an independence drive. That was, at least, my experience. I was able to move beyond people that I didn’t actually want to hang out with, and I was also able to see the vast world of snowboarding that I had invested much of my time to as more of the insular, crusty subculture that it was. These things that I loved and thought of as the most important and interesting were obscure at best.
I also felt like snowboarding was moving beyond what it had been when I first started following it, with Mr. White’s trick in 2010 serving as the prime example. My disgust at the trick also mirrored a disgust I felt at myself. Who was I to criticize Shaun White, when I wasn’t even close to that level? Moreover, I got tired of calling other riders whack or being called whack. The whole experience of attaching a “right” or “wrong” value to types of riding and subsequent zealotry in pursuing that vision burned me out.
I was, and still am, snowboarding, but I stopped caring what happened in the broader world of snowboarding.
Or did I? In 2014, a rider named Sage Kotsenberg took home gold from Sochi in slopestyle. His winning trick was a classic snowboarding moment. With his last run in the last stage of the Olympics, with everything on the line, Sage threw down a move that he had never tried before. How many other sports have that room for improvisation or sudden daring? For all of the gripes directed towards the awful sameness of contest riding, here was a moment that united everything that is great about snowboarding.
Shaun White had a rough go of it in Sochi. He dropped out of Slopestyle to focus on the halfpipe and failed to medal in that event as well. Needless to say, he took a lot of shit for it from other riders and others within the community. While I certainly do not begrudge him his fantastic work ethic or the subsequent decoration and fame that it has brought him, I believe that snowboarding has a culture that goes beyond him, and that if you are reading this and you are interested in Mr. White, you would do well to look a little deeper.
I rewatched That’s it, That’s all last year. Though I still saw some of the things in it that bothered me the first time, I was struck by the quality of the riding and the amount of sheer, dumb fun that they have in purposely getting lost and dicking around as a small group.
I have gotten back into the subculture, though I can now see it for what it is, rather than what I want it to be. From now until climate change ruins everything, snowboarding forever.
