Always has been, for me. But according to an article in Friday's Boston Globe, it's now cooler to ski than snowboard. Here's the article:
ASPEN, Colo. -- Sure, snowboarding may seem like the hot thing now. At the X Games here, kids mobbed Olympic champ Shaun White. Two teenage girls even had his name written across their cleavage, which is not only gratuitous but, you'd think, extremely cold.
But what's less noticed is that snowboarding may have quietly peaked. Skiing is cool again.And why not? Even in the halfpipe, White's signature event, skiers routinely outperformed him. While White, a.k.a. the Flying Tomato because of his wild red hair , lolled 16 feet above the rim of the pipe, spinning lazily, skiers like Maine's Simon Dumont launched 20 feet into the troposphere, Colorado's Peter Olenick threw a double back flip, and New Hampshire's Colby West nearly burned up on reentry .
"They definitely are going bigger," admitted Kevin Pearce, a pro snowboarder from Norwich, Vt. This kind of amplitude, which has not gone unnoticed by snow sports enthusiasts, may have helped fuel what is definitely a skiing resurgence.
For the first time since snowboarding grabbed the teenage imagination in the late '80s, skiing participation is up while snowboarding is down. A survey by the National Sporting Goods Association indicates that the number of skiers nationwide rose from 6.3 million to 6.9 million from 2004 to 2005, the last year for which statistics are available. Over the same period, the number of snowboarders sank from 6.6 million to 6 million, and SnowSports Industries America says snowboard sales dropped for the first time ever.
The trend is most pronounced among young skiers, the NSGA says, and a survey from the Canada Ski Council showed similar results.
"Skiing is the thing now," said Tateh Hopper, a 12-year-old skier from Aspen .
"I don't know many people who snowboard," says Molly Posenstein, 12, also of Aspen . (Rule of culture: If you want to know what's cool and what's next, ask a 12-year-old. They're quite definitive.)
Bryce Quigley, 12, who lives in Gilford, N.H., and skis at Gunstock Mountain, snowboarded until he was 9, then switched to skiing. "There's a lot more options with the tricks," he said. "For every trick for snowboarding, you've got two tricks for skiing, because you've got two skis." At age 11, he pulled off his first back flip. Officials at ski areas around New England say they've noticed more young skiers on the slopes, especially in the halfpipe and terrain park. Much -- if not most -- of the growth in skiing has been in the terrain park, which is why many snowboarders take credit for the return of skiing. After all, they were the ones who invented a new style of snowriding that skiers like Quigley have picked up.
"Snowboarders invented it, and now skiers are stoked on it," Pearce said.
Before they brought pipe and park to the slopes, they say, skiing didn't have much flare. It was stagnating. It wasn't a sport; it was how a Norwegian got to the grocery store. Boarders brought a new attitude and an edgy fashion sense, including baggy clothes and ostentatious patterns that skiers have adopted. And their snowboards inspired designs for wider skis with curved tips on the front and back that allow skiers to ride both forward and backward, like a snowboarder . Sales of these so-called "twin-tips" were up 70 percent last year, the fastest growing category in skiing. Now, while they were once derided by snowboarders as "two-plank wanks," it has almost gotten to the point where skiers are playing the bully.
"Ski kids think they're cooler than everybody," lamented snowboarder Paige Gentry, 12, of York, Pa.
"They think that if you do snowboarding, you're, like, nothing," said Devon Briggs, 12, of Aspen, another member of the oppressed minority.
Odd. Snowboarding used to have a monopoly on cool.
Sarah Murray, 30, started snowboarding in fifth grade. "It felt like a rebellion," said the Woodstock, Vt., native.
When Ross Powers of Stratton, Vt., started snowboarding in the mid-'80s, most mountains banned him. "Older people definitely looked down on us," Powers said. Banished to one specific trail, he had to take a skills test and get a license to mix in with skiers. By 1998 at the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, he was skilled enough to win America's first Olympic snowboarding medal, a bronze in the halfpipe, and won gold in that event at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City .
At last year's Olympics in Torino, Italy , US snowboarders took home every scrap of metal that didn't have to be mined, and the Flying Tomato ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone. "Snowboarding has become a whole family sport," Powers said. The sport is mainstream, which means, virtually by definition, that it's bound to become uncool.
"Maybe there's no more rebellion about being a snowboarder," said Murray. "Maybe it's rebellious to be a skier."
Or maybe it's just physics. As Murray talked about rebellion, a scene from the ski movie "Anomaly" played on the big screen at Aspen. Extreme skier Jamie Pierre jumps off a 255-foot cliff and lands unhurt. Dropping cliffs is easier on skis, since you have poles for balance and two feet to absorb the impact, while snowboarders sometimes wobble like lawn darts and land so hard they create crater-like holes.
"You have four edges instead of two," Pearce explained. Unshackled feet allow you to milk the terrain and maintain balance. Plus it's easier to get around the backcountry on skis. You think the 10th Mountain Division could have fought the Nazis on snowboards?
Skier Simon Dumont rides his four edges as well as anybody, and his fans know it. Out near the halfpipe were Emma Gardner, 15, and Julie Traylor, 16, ogling Dumont, partly because he can throw a 1,260-degree spin and partly because he is "dead-sexy" and "steezy," which means he has style with ease.
The teens didn't have Dumont's name written anywhere , though they soon may -- metaphorically speaking -- as skiers stand poised to become the hot new thing on snow.
