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Ok, so you've got THE BASICS down and are well on your way to being an official hater. You have a few solid arguments to anyone who dares be in favour of snowboarding in the olympics but were left a little stuck for words when the conversation went a bit too far into specifics. To help you on your way, today we're going to look at the individual events snowboarders can compete in at the olympics and break down why each and every one of them is lame as shit.
(As usual, this is written completely off the top of my head with zero fact checking, so take it for what it's worth. Don't agree? Sound off below but please still share it, I'm a click-whore above everything else after all.)
I had to start here because this is probably the one (two?) event that almost every snowboarder agrees is lame. I mean when was the last time you actually saw someone rocking hard-boots and a race board on the hill? Maybe it's different out east but I live in Whistler, arguably the biggest ski resort in the world, and three-plus months into the season I literally just saw the first race board of the year just last week – and it wasn't even on the hill! How much less relevant can you get? Slalom, grand-slalom, what are the events even called and why are they in there? No one quite seems to know but these "disciplines" are clearly only in there because they are the only ones the FIS dickheads can even remotely relate to. Unfortunately they have almost nothing to do with what is going on on the actual slopes. Yeah, yeah, I know what you racers will say already. Carving on a racing board is super fun. Well, yeah, I'm sure it is. But have you ever carved on a "regular" board and bindings lately? It's basically just as fun and when you get bored with that, ie. six carves later, you can then head to the park, the trees, the steeps or anywhere else on the mountain. Oh yeah, and you're wearing ski boots!
While most of us snowboarders do enjoy a good halfpipe comp, the current state of the U-ditch is such that it has become so big it has become completely unrelatable to 99% of snowboarders. I remember once upon a time when a few runs through the pipe was an essential part of any day of shredding. Then the pipe got bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And before long it was next to impossible to eek out even a two-foot air above the lip. Super fun, eh? At some point the majority of riders stopped even heading to the pipe on the regular and last I heard there were only about five or six superpipes even being built around the world. Add to that the fact that the flying tomatoe is basically twice as good as everyone else, who all look like goddamn robots for the most part, and watching a pipe comp has become about as fun as watching aerial skiing. Hell, even then commentators can't follow what the hell is going on. Apparently at the X-Games last week, over half the tricks were called wrong on-air. Robots fighting robots is for destroying large cities, not snowboarding.
Imagine if pow riding was an olympic event? Meghann O'Brien(sister of slopestyle rider Spencer) gets some. Hockenstein photo
Did you know that boardercross is not even allowed to be called by it's proper name cause some douche trademarked it and won't let anyone else use the proper term? How lame is that? In a better world though, you would be deducted time-points for not throwing in a few grabs while in the air and full-on contact (hello 360-shin-slash) would be rewarded. This is the IOCs real chance at coming full-circle to a more gladiator-like atmosphere. Not hardcore enough!
which brings us too…
While snowboarders could be blamed for initially rejoicing when we heard that slopestyle would become part of the "olympic program" a few years back, upon a bit more thought it because immediately clear that the IOC had only included it to boost it's rating and relevance in the real world. (How many lugers do you know?!) I mean, why else would they allow this cool an event in the olympics? To confirm our initial suspicions you need look no further than the olympic slopestyle course breaking people off as we speak. Instead of hiring an actual slopestyle course builder with, gasp, actual experience building good courses, they instead went with a complete unknown who, as we have now found out, built the course completely wrong – to the point that the riders had to speak up and demand changes. Which brings me to my biggest point of contention here. Once upon a time a slopestyle course had a ton of different features – jumps, rails, hips, gaps, etc – arranged in a way that you could not hit all of them, thus forcing the riders to exercise creativity in their line choice to best showcase their individual riding styles. Now, the way the courses are set up, everyone is basically forced to do the exact same run and in the process making it more into a spin-to-win contest than anything else. Triple-twisting, quad-flipping maneuvers are for aerial skiing, not slopestyle yet the IOC and FIS seem intent on making it as lame and relevant to real-life as every other event at the olympics. Boo IOC/FIS!
Update: Since drafting this two days ago, the slopestyle qualifiers went off. While many would have you believe they went smoothly, with most riders landing all their nutjob tricks and the course actually proving to be pretty damn good, all you have to do is listen to the endless stream of armchair judges coming out of the woodwork on facebook and the blogosphere to realize we all know way more about how a slope contest should be run than the people in charge. Don't like Mark's last score? Blame it on the judging. Someone explains to you why it scored that way? Hate on him!
It seems like hating on the olympics is the hottest thing going on the internet this week. And the damn thing hasn't even started yet! Once upon a time the olympics were not only revered, but people actually respected what they represented – in theory, the ability for nations to put aside their differences in the name of sport and as a testament to the awesomeness of man – but it seems like in recent years they have become much more of a symbol of everything that is wrong these days – the 1% controlling everything, corruption, scandal, epic wastes of money, the powers-that-be crushing the little guy and well, you name it, they've got it. So my advice to you? Watch those biathlon events in private and feel free to jump on the couch every time someone lands that triple sow-cow, but out there in the public world make sure you are hating with the rest of them. You wouldn't want to seem different, now would you? Hate, so hot right now, hate.
For those of you that don't get it yet, yes it's great to see our dear sport on the international stage but not in the way it's been treated and presented to the general mass-media-consuming public. The conclusion was likely forgone the moment snowboarding stepped into the olympic arena 16 years ago, but I can't help but feel we deserved better.
Don't forget to check out part one of this series of articles, THE BASICS
