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The 15 Best Snowboarding Posts on Imgur

January 28, 2014, 6:01 am
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This week we scoured the depths if Imgur to find their best snowboarding posts. Imgur is the photo sharing site beloved of Redditors and the great thing about it is that the photos come with their own comments, so our caption writer was able to take the week off...



15. Real men don't snowboard, they volcanoboard

"Apparently, one simply volcanoboards into Mordor."

Don't fancy the binding set-up much.



14. My daughter's first snowboard lesson

"Great job kiddo, but I'm mesmerized by the instructors feet. I wish I could walk like that."




13. Railslide 

Looking forward to this trick being pulled out the bag at the Lympics



12. How To Snowboard, This Is The Right Way, Correct?

"...the right way if you wanna be fucking AWESOME!!"



11. Kancolle snowboard




10. Snowboard Sharpie Project...






9. Tabletop





"I definitely thought this was a penis."



7. Didn't like my snowboarding helmet, so I fixed it.









4. I guess -7 is Amish snowboarding weather.





2. Snowboarding bruise.. it goes all the way around my arm and has grown.

"As a doctor on the internet: you'll need to cut it off...at the shoulder blade"



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Olympic Snowboarders Mug Shots - Why all the sad faces?

February 5, 2014, 6:56 am
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I thought I'd have a look around the snowboarder profiles on the Sochi Olympics site and two things struck me; firstly, the website was full of interesting glitches which made this process very tricky (but that seems to be a standard for this Olympics), and secondly, why do all the snowboarders look so damn grumpy?


This is supposed to be the pinnacle of their careers, but thay all look like they're being processed through a Gulag. For example these are the first 32 snowboarders that came up when I trawled the site:

Not a single happy face among them.

Actually it is a bit of an exaggeration. There was one exception: Nikita Avtaneev, from Russia, is having a fucking great time
as is his fringe

Instead of just presenting a depressing array of glum snowboarder faces, we've selected two groups of snowboarders to take a closer look at to see if we can solve this quandary...



Part 1 - The Olympics Most Wanted


Maybe they're sad because they're all going straight to jail.

Certified Lady Killer
22, Italy
Nickname: The Gypsy 
(that's what his profile says)



Chin Molestation
26, France
Education: Geography



'Merika - Fuck yeah!
21, Finland
Hobbies: Golf


Handily the Dutch team are rocking prison overalls

DUI (Driving Under the Influence)
26, Netherlands



Convicted of having a tiny head and a massive face
27, Italy
Ambitions: To compete at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi.



Freakishly Shiney Norendal
20, Norway
Most influential person in career: Her mother.



Albino Religious Assassin
25, Finland
Hobbies: Tennis, golf, spending time with friends.



Handling stolen goods
21, Sweden
Coach: Jocke Hammar



Not his first offence
27, USA
Superstitions / Rituals: He usually wears a bandanna around his face while snowboarding. (He snowboards blindfolded? How good is this guy?)




Part 2 - Adopt a Snowboarder

While I was staring at all the miserable mug shots, I spotted some particularly sad faces - the few lonely snowboarders who are the only ones representing their country. Maybe they're sad because they are lonely? If you haven't got someone to support at the upcoming festival of nationalism, why not consider one of these five...


(Andorra) - Snowboard Cross
Lluis, 25, comes from the tiny land-locked principality of Andorra. It's the sixth smallest country in Europe and the other country saddled with the partial-leadership of serial philanderer and useless President of France, François Hollande.

They do have some form in the sporting arena. According to the sports section of Wikipedia, "Andorra is famous for the practice of Winter Sports and Roller Hockey." And it goes on, "In 2012, Andorra raised its first national cricket team and played a home match against the Dutch Fellowship of Fairly Odd Places Cricket Club." They lost.

Lluis is currently 24th in the current FIS boardercross rankings, so you might get lucky and see him on the telly coverage.

He was the flag bearer for Andorra during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Adopt a Lluis this winter, he's Andorrable



(Belgium) - Slopestyle

Belgium: famous for fictional detectives, European political bureaucracy, chocolate and statutes of pissing children; not so famous for it's mountains or snowboarders. Despite all that Seppe Smits is quality; he was 4th in the X Games big air in 2014 and 2013, 10th in the slopestyle in 2014, but 3rd last year, and to top off his credentials he was the Antwerp Sport Figure of the Year in both 2010 and 2011!

Adopt a Seppe this year, he's got a decent change of being a podium botherer.



(Brasil) - Snowboard Cross
Isabel first tried snowboarding in 1994 at age 18 after going to visit her brother in California. It was the first time she'd seen snow. Now twenty years later she's having, what must surely be, her last go for Olympic glory.

Like Lluis she was the flag bearer for her country, she's actually done it twice at the 2006 Turin games and the 2010 Vancouver games. She's not a bad snowboarder either, she's currently 12th in the FIS boardercross rankings and she was ninth in the 2006 Turin Olympics.


Adopt an Isable this games - At the ripe old snowboarder age of 37, and with Terje avoiding the Olympics because he's too old, or something like that, Isabel has got to be the go-to choice of the more mature rider..



(Ireland) - Slopestyle & Halfpipe

At the other end of the scale is this cheeky chap who is representing Ireland at the tender age of 16. He was born and raised in the US, but seeing that qualification was going to be a little bit competitive he tried to find some other way of getting to the party. He was also eligible to represent Russia through his mother, and Great Britain through his father, but again the competition was a bit too much, so finally he made the decision to proudly compete for his forth choice; Ireland where his grandparents were born.

He's got no chance of winning a medal, but Seamus is the adoption choice for everyone who's now busy scouring their family history for any evidence of a historic family tie to some obscure Eastern European state.



And you're final adoption choice is...
(Kazakhstan) - Parallel Slalom (is that still an event?)

Valeruya, 25, will become the first Kazakh athlete to compete in a snowboard event at an Olympic Winter Games. She's 39th in the current FIS standings, so she's not got much chance of winning a medal, but you should consider adopting a Valeruya for Sochi, because of two things:

1. She has a lovely website

That's a coincidence, snowboarder is my star sign too.

& 2...











Well, that's 50% of you decided then.



So to summarise, I don't have any idea why all the Olympics snowboarders look so miserable. Any ideas?



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Snowboarding @ Sochi - The Story So Far

February 8, 2014, 4:51 am
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Just like our friends at the NSA, the team at Illicit Snowboarding have been tracking and spying on all the world's conversations. Here's the scoop of what we've found people have been talking about at the Sochi Olympics up to this point...













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The Fine Art of Pissing Off All The Right People

February 13, 2014, 7:49 am
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Sometimes it's not who you know, it's who you don't want to know...


A few things have happened during the Olympic slopestyle event that will have some interesting knock-on effects for snowboarding:

  • Slopestyle was the first event of the Olympics and happened to fall on the weekend, which meant it got great TV coverage and a huge audience.
  • The event itself was quality. The course didn't become the story, the level of riding was right up there and we got a bit of everything; from winning creative runs to a lady smashing a helmet in two. It's going to stick in people's minds.
  • The women's slopestyle event was particularly strong. They were taking on equally large jumps as the men and going massive. For a public used to seeing male dominated sports, the equality of the course and the standards was a revelation.  Of all the people proclaiming they were thinking about taking up snowboarding after watching the event, the demographic was noticeably weighted towards women. And that's a good thing for our own particular historically male dominated sport.
  • People who don't usually watch snowboarding were excited about slopestyle it in a way they never really have been about the halfpipe. It's an instantly understandable sporting concept and it was much easier for the layperson to get a feeling for the huge amplitudes/athleticism/risks involved.

And finally

  • Snowboarding displayed a level and depth of personality which was very different to the other Olympic events. All the traditional Olympic sports rules we're out the window and it was completely at odds with what people expected to see. 


There was some inappropriate knitting...


The competitors were relaxed and friendly to each other.

The uniforms were baggy and impractical.

The Swiss riders were proudly displaying the Swiss flag across their arses.

The sported a variety of shitty haircuts.

There was a massive doll in the middle of the run.

They didn't seem to care if they won or lost.

They didn't care.

The Russian and New Zealandish riders we're primarily there to get laid.

They all had personalities and were interesting to interview.

They had weird names for everything.

They talked weird all of the time. No one could understand a thing that Sage Kotsenburg said and no one knew if what they were saying was a trick name, snowboarding slang or just swearing profusely.

& finally...

In the UK the commentary was something us Brits are really not used to. It was done by people who really care about the sport, it was funny, hectic and it was chocked full of passion. And lo and behold, 300 people immediately complained to the BBC. It caused quite the kerfuffle and required an official BBC response.


What's interesting, is that the other programme people have taken time out of their busy schedules of being insufferable twats to moan about, is the biggest and most successful motoring programme in the world. Top Gear didn't reach that position by running the same car review programme that everyone else did, they got their by doing their own thing, fully aware that if you do something right you're going to piss off some people. Pissing off those people is the right thing to do, they're not going to be your audience so don't cater to them.

Unlike TopGear snowboarding isn't something run by a few people who can carefully control what they do, its a very lose collection of a huge number of people and businesses from all around the world. But through our history and due a huge dollop of chance, when it came to this event there was an overriding trend: snowboarding had a clear identity of people doing incredible things and having a good time doing it. A simple mix, but one that just isn't common and because it's different and outside the expected, it's going to piss some people off.

There is an art to pissing people off. The complainers weren't getting pissed off because snowboarding or snowboarders were intentionally trying to piss them off, they're getting pissed off because they are imbeciles. Just pissing people off doesn't work, that just makes you a charmless git and no one will be interested, but doing the right things and pissing off the right sort of people, will take this sport a long way.



And now let's take a look at exactly the sort of people we don't want. Here are some of my favourite comments by the Daily Mail audience from a variety of their shonky Olympics coverage including this piece of journalistic vomit.


Do one, smokinggun12

Do one, Ally from Scotland; you know, that bit of the UK with all the mountains. 

Do one, Scotty the man wit the amazing goldfish memory said commenting on an article he'd just read about Jenny Jones.

Do one, upthesock. I think the U.S. won all the medals with the sub-prime mortgage crash

Do one, Peter27. Missing you already.

Do one, Bruno. Never heard of you either.

 Do one, norstar. Go back to watching the travesty that was The Jump.

 Do one, benji mcpherson and take your 90s cultural references with you.

Ouch

And finally, some classic Daily Mail...
Do one, Davetherave you bring the world nothing


A final word of warning

Go back a hundred years and the Olympics was an amateur event, each sport was new, largely casual and unique like the snowboarding slopestyle was this year. Over the years as they 'professionalised' they all lost their character. There's a danger this could happen to snowboarding too, you can see it in what happened to slalom and what seems to be happening to the halfpipe. 

Snowboarding needs to be remain different and retain it's identity. 

Shaun White was a fierce competitor and a granted, a bit of a dick, but whatever you feel about him he is a character and he has his own style. He's divisive because he does things his own way. He's one of those disparate elements that makes up the current character of snowboarding. In a big group there is a constant rush to conformity and Mr White is a good example of someone pillarised for doing things differently by the snowboarding community. Despite our need to want everyone to be like us and feel the same way, we must be aware that all these differences are healthy and they matter. Any time some snowboarder is forced to conform slightly by community opinion we lose a little more of our identity. 

It's internal pressures from the world of snowboarding that could bring that bland fate about, not pressures from the casual viewers that watch the Olympics and complain once every four years. We should be pissing some of these occasional Olympic audiences off and to remain healthy we should also be pissing ourselves off all the time. Difference should be encouraged. For snowboarding the historical embrace of difference and being different is what made the slopestyle at the Olympics really work. We need to do everything we can to stop conformity from happening, to stop us become just another bland Olympic sport. 

As the saying should go: You can't please all of the people all of the time, but if you piss off some of them all of the time, then you're on to a winner.

Have a nice day


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What's the Score? It's time for a new judging system

February 17, 2014, 6:19 am
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Yet again, during and after an important snowboarding competition, one of the main things everyone was talking about was the judging. Questioning the judging of a sport isn't a topic unique to snowboarding, but the level and consistency of it is. When we should be talking about the snowboarding itself, we're forced to spend time trying to figure out what's going through the minds of a group of anonymous guys sitting in a little temporary hut. But the problem isn't the judges themselves, the problem is the judging system - The current system is fundamentally flawed and it needs to change...


What's the current system?

At some point, back in the early days of snowboarding someone decided that the best way to judge events like the pipe, slopestyle and big air, would be to use an extremely simple 100 unit scoring system based entirely on the subjective opinion of a small group of judges. A generation later and the scoring of snowboarding events hasn't evolved at all.

1986 Snowboarding World Championships, same rules, slightly more dogs.
 photo by Bryce Kanights

These events can't be decided by a simple element like time or distance, so some judgement of execution/style has to be used. At the Olympics, on the two relevant snowboard events, this was decided by six judges. The judges had to decide how they'll positively score each successful trick/run and how they'll punish mistakes. They then try very hard to judge all the runs on the same merits. Like all snowboard comps, the most technical run performed without error can in theory get 100 points.

And that's about as detailed as it gets.


Why doesn't the system work?

Firstly, it's not a system. It's a bunch of people figuring out a series of subjective scores in what is essentially just a controlled squabble.

Humans are naturally flawed judges. People make mistakes, they differ in terms of what they like or don't like, who they like or don't like, the level of experience they have or what mood they are in. Worst of all people's brains are inherently inconsistent when it comes to processing what they are seeing and what they remember. That inconsistency over the length of a competition means that competitors at the start and end of the event are invariably judged differently. The solution for this is to understand this limitation and add a system to reduce the effects. No matter how good any judge is, you can make their decisions better.

There's inconsistently over time and over competitions. Over the last few days people have spent a lot of time arguing over the relative merits of triple corks versus flat spins and how they were judged. The judges of previous events had been favouring the triple cork, but in Sochi the 1440 came out on top. There's no obvious reason for the change, but the worst thing is the inconsistency.

Our judges are being overwhelmed with information. There are a large number of factors in snowboarding that need to be judged, from amplitude to creativity, and from style to mistakes. It's extremely difficult for any one judge to factor all those elements in accurately in the 30 seconds or so they have to watch the event.

photo from Whitelines
"Bloody hell, did you catch any of that?"
"Sorry mate I blinked."
"Shit. We'll just have to copy what Dave wrote again."


All those judging factors are lumped together. When you do that you leave it open for more variation over the competition. The judges might start by favouring technicality but end up inadvertently focusing on execution.

In every competition the first suckers who have to make a run have no clue about how those judging factors will be balanced. While they try hard to fight the impediment of running early, everyone else is left to guess what the rules might be by watching how they fair. At the Olympics this went on for entire rounds of competition, because unlike other competitions there was now communication between the judges and the riders. Better communication speeds up the learning process, but it doesn't remove the problem. Everyone should be able to go into a competition knowing ahead of time what kind of score they could get if they land their chosen run.

A closed scale of 100 doesn't allow for progression. This scoring system doesn't in any way reflect the huge steps that have happened over a generation, and the tricks are only getting bigger. The riders of the YOLO flip era are getting the same scores as the riders from the 720s era as if nothing has changed. When you stick with a limited scale like this you can't even compare the performances of the same rider in different competitions.

Was Gian Simmen's gold winning run 1998 really the equivalent of what were were seeing this year?

He probably should have lost some points for losing his hat.


They were using six judges. That's not an odd number, so you can't got to a vote if people don't agree. You end up needing a head judge to make the ultimate decision and one person is far more likely to make a bad call than a group.

This isn't just a FIS issue. In this particular issue, it's not simply the fault of perennial scapegoat and everybody's favourite bad guys, the FIS. This problem doesn't just occur at the Olympics, it happens in all the snowboarding competitions all of the time, irrespective of size, scale or the particular group of people organising them.



How do other sports solve the problem?

There are a range of other sports that face the same problem of trying to marry up technicality and creativity through judging, but no other Olympic sport is lumbered with such a simple and flawed system as snowboarding. Over the years they have all added a more rigorous system into their judging to significantly reduce the type of problems that have been experiencing in snowboarding. There's a long page on Wikipedia detailing the judging systems of each of these sports, but there's no similar page for snowboarding. If these sports can do it better, so can we.


Diving 

They have a better scoring system, but at least we get to use goggles to help keep our faces tidy.

All dives are given pre-agreed a degree of difficulty number. In the event the dives are judged on execution on a scale of 10 (3 for the take-off, 3 for the flight, 3 for the entry and 1 for the judges discretion), then that number is multiplied by the degree of difficulty to provide the final score.  As the difficulties of the dives increase over time the scores get higher.


Gymnastics

They have a better scoring system, but at least we have heads.

They break things down into two scores:

Difficulty score. Different skills are given scores (i.e a back layout salto with a full twist [love that trick] is given a difficulty of G and a G skill earns you 0.7 points). The scoring is open-ended so as the skills become more difficult the scores can continue to grow over time.

Execution score. You start with a score of 10 (although because they use decimals it's essentially 100) and if you make any mistakes marks are taken away.
Add the two together and you get your score. If two people end up with the same score the person with the higher execution score wins.

Here's what that looked like for the men's pommel horse at the 2012 Summer Olympics




Ice Dancing 

They have a better scoring system, clearly.

It's another one where they have two scores which they add together:

Program Components Score. It's the sum of the scores of 5 elements: skating skills, transitions, performance/execution, choreography and interpretation. Each element is scored out of 10 in chunks of 0.25 (so essentially out of 40).

Technical Element Score. It's an open scale score judged like this:
Each element is judged first by a technical specialist who identifies the specific element and determines its base value. The technical specialist uses instant replay video to verify things that distinguish different elements; e.g., the exact foot position at take-off and landing of a jump. The decision of the technical specialist determines the base value of the element. A panel of twelve judges then each award a mark for the quality and execution of the element. This mark is called the grade of execution (GOE) that is an integer from −3 to +3. The GOE mark is then translated into another value by using the table of values in ISU rule 322. The GOE value from the twelve judges is then processed with a computerized random selection of nine judges, then discarding the high and low value, and finally averaging the remaining seven. This average value is then added to (or subtracted from) the base value to get the total value for the element.

They use 9 judges and they discard the highest and lowest scores.

Here's all those numbers from the Men's singles event at Sochi




There's obviously lot there we never want to see judged in a snowboarding competition, but the thing is, if they can do all of that judging as quickly as they do in the ice dancing, then we can clearly do a little better than just coming up with one number.

All these sports ultimately are scored on a base of roughly 100 units, and at first glance they seem the same, but the level of detail is significantly different in all the established sports. We've been doing this for a generation now, it's time that we sorted this out.



The solution

Snowboarding needs a system. We need to learn from the experiences of other sports, but we also need to create something that works for our unique sport. Here's what we need to start doing:


1. Break out the elements and score them separately.

To judge a snowboarding competition you are probably looking at these four elements:

  • Amplitude 
  • Technicality
  • Style
  • Execution

Amplitude, the height out of the pipe or the size of the slopestyle air can be measured accurately.

Technicality, the difficulty of the attempted trick set. Each trick should have a specific technical score, agreed and shared in advance by the judges. We would then know the relative merit of the different tricks before the competition starts. It would also clarify how the rails and jumps are valued in comparison in the slopestyle.

Style. Now that's the tricky one, it is almost totally subjective and styles can and do change, but by breaking it out, you do at least have a shot of consistency through a competition. If you stick to a fixed scale for this one, at least the subjectivity is reduced down to just affecting 1/4 of the overall score. I say 'almost totally subjective' because I think we can at least all agree that pulling a Tindy should always be punished.

Like fellow bloggist Agnarchy, caught in the act while riding Pine Knob. 
(Apparently that's that's name of a ski hill and he's not been getting acquanted with what Pinocchio keeps in his pants)

Execution. Again slightly subjective, but we could produce a pre-agreed scale of negative scores for mistakes. A hand down is bad, a butt check is worse, a fall is awful. We could also set-out whether a mistake on one object will affect the overall score or just the score on that portion.


2. Provide total visibility. Before the competition the technical and execution scoring sytem should be shared and after the competition each aspect of the results should be shared. People will be less likely to argue with open and transparent scores. The new stats would also bring a new element to competitive snowboarding - the ability to better compare the values of different snowboarders, the ability to set and break records.


3. Always have an odd number of judges.


4. Remove the highest and lowest scores to reduce bias and short-term inconsistency. It means that we should try to have at least 7 judges to allow for that. In the Olympics we should aim for 9.


5. For big events you could have specific people measuring or judging each element. Simplify each person's job and it reduces the risks that they will suffer form information overload.


6. Slow down the judging. There's no benefit to having a quick result. Why not let them look at replays when they are comparing two very close runs? Waiting a minute for some of the key results didn't affect the Olympic competition in any negative way. In fact it actually added an extra element of suspense. It's something TV talent shows have been milking for years and American Football has built a whole sport around the premise.


7. Use an open scoring scale. If you award a certain amount of points for each achievement, the scores can increase as the sport progresses. You can also keep a consistent score for each element (for example; a 720 like Gian Simmen threw in 1998 could always be worth 10 points, and Iouri Podladtchikov's Cab Double Cork 1440 YOLO Flip could now be a 24 point score). For mistakes you'd use the same thing (-2 points for squireling the landing, -10 points for a hand down, and so on). Stick with a system like that and instead of talking about the strange judging, the press could have been talking about I-Pod's new Olympic record.


8. Make sure that the right balance of technicality and style is achieved. This is all about setting the balance of the overall scoring system so that the balance makes sense. It's important that snowboarding doesn't become a spin-to-win event or just a style event like ice dancing. By using a scoring system like this and controlling the balance we can make sure it doesn't go too far down either route. It would solve yet another almost constant argument in the world of snowboarding.



I don't know about you, but I'm tried of the status-quo, tired of the lack of progression and tired of snowboard events being dominated by the opaque judging format and questionable judging decisions. Let's get on and fix this so we can get back to snowboarding and talking about snowboarding.




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Ed & Tim's words of wisdom as motivational posters

February 20, 2014, 1:41 am
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So that's the five-ringed circus over for another four years. One of the unexpected highlights for us was the poetic musings Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood when they were let lose on the BBC coverage. To tide you over until it all starts again in Pyeongchang 2018, we've created some cut-out-and-keep memorabilia so you can relive their words of wisdom any time you like...














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It reminds me of that time that we tried our hands at making some motivational snowboard posters.


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The sweariest (and possibly best) and least sweariest (and dullest) snowboard books ever written

February 27, 2014, 6:03 am
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The rise of the internet has transformed publishing in the same way that it transformed the music industry. If you fancy becoming a writer these days, you're no longer at the mercy of a few big publishing companies and there's now a raft of ways that you can foist your book upon the world. Just like music too, some of this newly available product is great, but some most of it is absolute crap. We decided to delve into the world of self-published snowboard books by reviewing three of them. Here's what we found...


1. Belle de Neige by Belle de Neige

Classic self-published book cover: hard-to-read fonts, some ropey Photoshopped shadow and a nice bit of underboob action. You wouldn't get that through a publisher.


I've been a reader of the Belle de Neige blog for a good while now. She's always been a good writer with interesting angles on life and ranting, so I was the ideal audience to read this book. However none of that left me expecting a book of the quality this one turned out to be.

Often books produced from blogs are just a series on loosely connected articles, and they're not much of an enhancement on just reading the blog itself. Instead of just dressing up and recycling her blog posts as is the tradition, she's gone back to the start and written a proper book. It's the story of her first year as a seasonaire and that overarching storyline makes a huge difference. Some of the ideas in her old posts have been included along with some other choice anecdotes, but they've been integrated directly into the flow of story to enhance it rather than dominate it.

But what takes this from being just a competent book to be a really great book is that running through it all is a level of depth you just won't be expecting if you've just read the blog, the book description or looked at the muggy book cover. Try this for a first line:


Deaths, and therefore funerals, come when you least expect them.

Now that's how you start a book.

One of the main threads that runs through the book is the story of Belle and how she deals with the death of her best friend just before she starts the season. How she writes that in terms of how it is gradually revealed and conveyed makes this book.

But don't get me wrong, this is not chick lit. This might be a book that forays into serious issues in a sensitive manner, but all the rest of the content is pretty much the exact opposite. If Belle de Neige was hired as an Olympic commenter, within moments of her starting, and if you happened to have your windows open, you would actually be able to hear the chilling echo of thousands of Daily Mail's readers heads exploding. Here's an example...

Next morning I wake up in his bed with something that smells suspiciously like puke in my hair and a large, pink piece of chewing gum wedged inside my arse crack.


Yup, she's a classy lady with a nice turn of phrase. Here's a little recollection on her fellow chalet maid...

"Why don't the lifts go up both sides? It'd make the queues smaller." 

Yes, as I have said, this is the sort of fuckbucket that tour Operators employ to cook your food.


On love...

"OK" he conceded and started  shagging me again. And then stopped again and looked at me fondly. "I love being inside of you." he said passionately. "It's like being part of a nice, big, warm....sausage roll!"



Now how can you resist a chap like that?



On ski resort culture...

Legends abound. According to folk lore, there was once an 18-year-old girl named 'Harriet the Chariot' who slept with a total of two hundred people during her time as a Chalet Bitch. If I've got my maths right, that must mean she was bonking about two a day. Every day.


On ski resort weather...


Watching a ski resort get rained on is like watching a child's sandcastle get pissed on by a drunk old man.


On hangovers...


Your eyes are all swollen like little squirrel cunts.

And while we're on the topic, perhaps the peak of her achievement is managing to fit in an entire chapter all about the word cunt, that isn't at all out of place..

Part advice book, part diary, part exposé, part therapy and part diatribe, it's clear why it's been written anonymously. Nothing is left out, no people or feelings are spared, there are not editing compromises to make it more mundane and as a result it's great. The book is riddled with vomit, drugs, booze, poor life decisions, sex and dirt, it makes the Helgasons look like polite little school boys. (Note to Lobster, if you ever get into book sponsorship, here's where you should start)

I wouldn't want to stay in her chalet, but I'd be there for the party.


Recommendation:

This is one book you really can't judge by the cover. It really undersells itself and over delivers - something that might not have happened if it had gone through a publishing house. It's easily the best book I've read with anything remotely to do with snowboarding and it's one of the better books I've read outside of that. I don't know why it did get professionally published, I can only suspect that it's got something to do with the cunt chapter.

Buy it immediately. Here it is on Amazon UK and Amazon US



Seeing as I've spent some time bashing the cover I thought I'd make some alternatives. Maybe one of these can be used for the reprint or the movie...


If instead of snowboarding Jenny Jones chose to focus her first season on sex and drugs this is would be the story of her life...




Fear and Loathing in Val d'Isère




It was just like The Wolf of Wall Street, with the exact opposite amount of money.



Or how about a cross between Chalet Girl and Nyphomaniac?






I also read...

Snowdays by Larry Moller


Here's the idea in a nutshell.


Sadly the back cover was the only bit of the book that was concise in any way. The first five percent of the book was dedicated to drearily describing the two main character's drive to Mount Baker. That doesn't even include any background to the characters or a starting point to the journey, we just pick up on them somewhere on their way. I can now confirm that starting a book with the details of a commute is a really horrific idea. Here's the best bit of that swathe of tedium:

In the background the wipers go swish, vish.

And there lies the next big problem, and this is a big problem for a book: the writing. Here are a few other examples and bear in mind here that the main character doesn't have Tourettes.

"Ohh, loo, koo, koo, ca, koo, koo, koeew," I holler, at the top of my lungs issuing a challenge to race.

I imagine Vic Wild used this technique to win his two Olympics golds



"Wheew," I remark to myself. "No line and there's Darrin waiting for me." 

...he said, talking to himself



The race is important but we have to also get the biggest sponsors; Burton, Vans, Sims they will line up like dogs for this.

Have dogs ever been renowned for being good at lining up?


We are about halfway to the top. On the right side of the road rises a behemoth. Bigger than all the rest it rises from a forest of giants. I silently give my oath of passage, "Oi, Oi, Oi," whispering, making the hang loose sign with my free hand. Darrin stops singing and also whispers an "Oi," and makes a hang loose sign. It's a tradition. 

Two things: 1. How can you silently whisper? & 2. WTF?


Those passages are at least interesting because they are so bonkers, but unfortunately the rest of the writing is just endless swathes of dull. I'm going to give one example here to give you a sense of what I waded through and I'm sorry if this pushes any of you into a coma.

My musing is interrupted by the approaching unloading station. We didn't strap in because this run is flat at the top and must be skated. I get off the lift, swivelling and tucking my back foot into the space between my front foot and back binding. The first ten feet is steep but if you don't keep your speed up down this incline then you have to skate even further. Dropping in, I wobble then flatten out, gaining speed quickly, too much speed, my board wobbles harder. I fight to control myself with the toes of my front foot, putting pressure on the edge. We reach the bottom of the ramp barely avoiding wiping out on the turn. Then we skate nu pushing our boards with our back foot until we reach the downslope.

That was a whole paragraph dedicated to telling you about how the character got off a lift. A whole fucking paragraph! And it's like this the whole way through.

One of the problems with snowboarding is that it's so difficult to describe what happens during you day in a compelling way. I went up the hill, I went down the hill, I did a jump, it was good. It's hard to make it any more interesting than that, it's as impossible as painting a rainbow. Ignoring that fundamental problem, this guy ploughs on endlessly despite all evidence to suggest it isn't working. And that's just the problem with describing snowboarding, Larry Moller then also tries to do describe in detail the experience of even less interesting things, like being on a lift, driving a campervan or having lunch. And that's just trying to polish a turd, nothing is safe from being over-explained to death.

But, this writing isn't just tedious, it's wet. He's studiously avoided anything that even remotely resembles a swear word. Time and time again, he's veered spectacularly away from anything that remotely reflects the way people actually talk. Here are some of his most extreme efforts...

My mom's brownies are frick fracking killer.

You fart-smeller.

Dude, you snore like a ding dang freight train.

Heck yeah that's fricking awesome!

What the fetch are you talking about?

I don't know what the fat you are talking about.

Those guys are frixk, fracking, fakwads!

Oh my lordy lord! What the fat, we got dirty dogged.

The problem is that Larry Moller might actually be the nom de plume of Ned Flanders. 

Unfortunately this isn't going to be a complete review, because I can't rate the story story itself. It was your standard snowboarders versus skiers bollocks for the part I did read, but never made it to the end. It was actually hard to follow the story through all the chaff. For the first time in my snowboard book reviewing experience I didn't make it through this one. I just couldn't. I've read some awful books over the years, but this is by far the dullest. I can only assume that a shit load more really dull occurrences were described and that in the end something overwhelmingly dull occurred.


To summarise; this book needed a lot of editing, the writing was poor, wet and amazingly dull, it started badly and the story was progressing badly before I was forced to give up before I killed myself.

Here it is on Amazon

Recommendation: Frick this ding dang book, buy Belle de Neige's one. Here's another link so you can buy that one instead.




You might notice that I promised three books and only delivered two. I have read the third book, but for reasons that will be come horribly apparent, it really has to be dealt with separately. Something to look forward to if you're a fan of snowboard book reviews.



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Illicit went to Mayrhofen and this is what we found...

March 12, 2014, 7:39 am
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Last week we went snowboarding in Mayrhofen and while we were there we noticed a few strange things...



By law all Austrian booze labels must include a portrait of a creepy beardy old geezer

"Hey ladies, as you can tell from this nocturnal bird on my shoulder, I'm a hooters man."


Although they do occasionally use creepy groin-thrusting young men to mix things up.


You can ratchet up the creepy factor by tooling your old beardy bloke up with a shotgun.


Fancy a glass of old man spit?


The Jolly Creepy Green Giant


This stuff was 50% proof. I don't read Austrian, but from the picture it seems to be some sort of potion to turn everyone into old creepy beardy men.


If you don't have a painting of a sinister old man to decorate your booze the other alternative is to package it in a giant cartoon sperm.



And if you want something to go with your spunk drink, why not try a large chocolate...


Or maybe some... 

I bought some of these....they were cream-filled   :|


Snowbombing does't quite look like what I was expecting

One of the biggest ski resort music festivals, Snowbombing is based in Mayrhofen. Here's what you can look forward to this year...

That's one impressive white leather cock flap


I spotted that poster outside one bar and a little way down the street was this...

The Freddy Pfister Band.

And if that didn't already look like the sort of van you should never hitch a ride in, here's what was on the back...

Pfister goes full Shawshank.


The hits don't stop there. In one shop I found a whole stash of CDs from the local noise makers.


Marc Pircher and his wind box


Schürzenjäger (which means heartbreaker) and their magnificent hair and team tank tops


The squinty-eyed Ursprung Baum


The Zillertaler Mander and their unmissable album Milk Machining with Folk Music


Local lads Die Mayrhofner and their classic ode to Mother Teresa.


Here's Die Mayrhofner and his well groomed moustache getting sinister with some kids


And finally Die Mayrhofner again, this time with a seriously questionable cartoon representation of a black man


Still, maybe it's just a one off and usually that sort of thing isn't acceptable in Mayrhofen.

Oh


Sex obsessed toy shops

I found those bathing fellas in one of the local souvenir/toy shops. It's clearly very wrong, but strangely it wasn't at all that out of place. In a store filled with small children, and in amongst the Star Wars and Lego were a host of really dubious things... 

...like this masturbating bull for example.

Here are a few other things I found scattered around that shop and in a couple of others.

Dicks with faces in tuxedos


Pig sex condiment holders, penis salt shakers and tit mugs


a cock girth measuring device


An apron to make you look like you are fucking a sheep


& bottle openers that nightmares are made of 


A few other things we found


On the way to Mayrhofen we found Camping Hell


In town, for a hefty €435 you could buy a crystal unicorn


Classic postcards...

"Hi Gran, I found this photo of some snowboarders wearing cock socks and I thought of you. Wish you were here."


We sent this one off to Vladimir Putin


There was a shop that exclusively sold baby clothes, knitting wool and cigarettes.

Counter cat owned the place


This guy's neck


And finally...

The guy snowboarding around the place with a chainsaw. I think Nitro was his Running Man name.



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Search

Split Personalities - Is this the graphic future for splitboards?

March 25, 2014, 7:52 am
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In 1991, Brett "Cowboy" Kobernik was the first person to saw a snowboard in half, thus inventing the splitboard. Over the following two decades splitboarding slowly become more popular as it moved from the realms of solitary bearded blokes hacking apart snowboards in garages, to being shiny products anyone can buy in shops. The last few years in particular have seen a noticeable surge in the number of splitboards being produced by a whole raft of manufacturers, but we couldn't help noticing that the unique development of splitboarding has left a slightly odd legacy...

Question: Here's a row of new splitboards produced by a variety of companies (Amplid, Arbor, Elan, Goodboards, Jones and Völkl). Can you see what they all have in common with non-split snowboards for no practical reason?


Answer: They all look like your standard non-split snowboards. From any sort of distance you can't see that your expensive transforming snowboard is any different from a standard snowboard, and that's a bit strange for two reasons:

One.
At any distance, if you look at a variety of snow riding devices with different features, you can tell them apart. You can easily see the difference between a snowboard and skis, skis and snowblades, or a snowboard and a dual snowboard. But you can't see the difference between a splitboard and a snowboard, you can't clearly see the key feature that makes a splitboard a splitboard.

Two.
At the same time, from a distance you can see the difference between a jib board and a powder board. For those two types of snowboard there is a small difference in shape and size but the really obvious difference is in graphics. Jib boards are resplendent with bright colours and big graphics, whereas powder boards tend towards more conservative, cleaner graphics that veer towards the earthy side of things. There's a good reason for the difference. The people that use the two types of boards are different, they want boards that reflect that difference and over time the graphics have developed to reflect this. Splitboards though look just the same as any other powder board.

(Point two is a more subtle version of point one, where snowblades and dual snowboards were created so that normal people can easily identify and avoid the dickheads that are drawn to them like flies are drawn to shit.)


If splitboards had been invented before snowboards they wouldn't look just like snowboards and they'd have made more of a feature of their key feature.


Splitboards should have split graphics.

Across the years splitboards have been around the closest anyone has got to doing this is the you-probably-didn't-even-notice-they'd-tried subtle difference the Burton Freebird had this season, or a basic colour change like you see on the base of some of the Jones boards. It's a bit strange that no one has really gone with it and made it a strong graphical feature. It's a product that's calling out for a strong and unique graphical difference to go with it's unique functionality.

A split design wouldn't add anything to a standard snowboard and no one is begging for the odd skis aesthetic for a reason. This is a graphic style that only makes sense on a splitboard, so it's something that will remain unique and can be developed further over time. The first company that does it would have a really stand-out product in a rapidly growing market and all it takes is a bit of colouring in.


To illustrate the point I've done some quick mock-ups based around an obvious play on words. I've used a simple graphic style (that wouldn't ideally suit the sort of things splitboarders want on their boards) and to really bang the message home I've pinched some concepts from the very copyrightastic field of comics...









What do you think? 



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Rants From The Mountain - The Vilest Snowboard Book Ever Written

April 8, 2014, 6:51 am
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A few weeks ago I reviewed two self-published books, one was great, the other incredibly dull, but as I mentioned I had planned to review three. This week we deal with that third book - Rants From The Mountain by Allan Saro. It's pitched as being a mix of advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, a behind-the-scenes look at lift operations and the story of Allan Saro's season. That's what was promised, but what was delivered was something entirely different...


The first time I experienced a prostate orgasm was at four o'clock in the morning, in my apartment in Orange County, New York. 

That's the first line of the book, and like any standard advice book for beginner snowboarders/skiers, it starts with an anecdote about him having a strap-on up his ass. Now this could have gone one of two ways; he could have managed to strike the delicate balance between crudity, insight and emotion that Belle de Neige did in her excellent book, or he could have taken the route that nobody could possibly want. Unfortunately he chose route two, and the results are horrific.


----------------------------------------
WARNING: Just so you are under no illusion, every quote from this book is incredibly offensive. This is the point to step away if you don't want that sort of thing in your life.
----------------------------------------


After the initial reminiscences about anal sex, he swerved into some standard advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, covering off a the topics of what to wear and when to go. Then just six pages in, we get to the sub-section 'Snowboarding vs. Skiing'. Now, I don't know what you'd be expecting to read when you start a section with that title, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't expect it to be about Allan Saro having unprotected sex with an underage girl. Sadly, that's exactly what it is...

I had fucked strippers, models, women twice my age, many seventeen-year-olds, even my twenty-five-year-old bio teacher when I was in the ninth grade. But this? This was an entirely different level. If I got busted for this, I wouldn't be yelled at, have my hours cut, or even get fired. I would go to fucking prison - not jail, where you work out and make a few friends, but prison. I would be getting slammed in the ass by serious criminals who look at a pathetically delicate white boy like me as fresh meat. But them, that's what being an American is all about. It's about taking changes and living the spirit of entrepreneurialism. I saw an opportunity and rolled the dice. in a way, by having sex with that young woman, I was helping not only our economy but the true spirit of America.

I'm not from the US, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm very sure he's horribly misunderstood the key aspects of the American dream. As if all of that wasn't quite heinous enough, he ploughed on...

I didn't care if Ski Patrol was about to walk in on us, if the next liftee was pounding on the door, or if a little kid was being trampled to death by the chairs, this shit was going down. Four minutes before the next liftee was due up to relieve me I pulled my cock out of Dylan and painted the state of Hawaii on her tanned stomach.

Clearly, by this point Allan Saro still felt like these few pages didn't vehemently insult quite every moral and belief of the Western world, so he then thought it would be a good opportunity to have a pop at it's predominant religion while also clarifying that he's fully aware of how wrong his actions are...

I'd like to think there was an angel there looking out for me, keeping me safe. I don't know a lot about Christianity, but from what news headlines I've read, they sure do seem good at covering up child molestation, so I'd like to think maybe God had a special plan for me that day.

Grim



By page 29 he'd moved on to explain how you can steal snowboard and ski gear, but he still managed to make that section worse by taking the time to regale us with a little more unwanted insight into his views on children.

I was due back at my station half and hour ago, but I thought it was best I stayed put to keep a watchful eye. (Also to finish rubbing one out, but some old douche-bag walked by my car before I could cum.) Now I would have to wait for another scantily dressed preteen to run by with her neglectful, equally scantily clad mother.
(Yeah that's right. Grown men fantasize about having sex with your little girl. Think it's fucked up? Stop letting them dress like prostitutes and grown women, you fucking asshole. ... You're a disgusting piece of shit for allowing your daughter to dress like that.)

After horrifically misreading how everyone else thinks, he continues his quest to be the most repugnant man in snowboarding history...

After a month of being there, the job was starting to kill me, I had to work in brutal conditions (usually while high), for shit pay. The owner was onto me and breathing down my neck, desperate to fire me, but what I discovered next made it all worthwhile. I finally found my personal honey pot. I found a veritable assembly line of young girls, on that I would savagely harvest. Doing more drugs and underage girls in a span of five weeks than my entire life up to that point.

Mind you, I would be subtle. I've watched enough 'Dateline: to Catch A Predator' specials to know how to ride the fine line. I had a very delicate system.

Seriously Allan, Dateline; To Catch A Predator is not a fucking how-to-guide.


He then cracked on to some kid in the lift queue:

That is why you should never leave your child unattended on the mountain. Not only can they get hurt, but also fucked. I'm not sure what's worse, knowing your child is in a hospital bed somewhere or knowing she's in my bed somewhere. A little parenting goes a long way.

What's worse Allan, is you.


Chapter 4: Parenting

Good god, he's got a chapter where he has the gall to hand out parenting advice, and by now you should know where this is heading. By the end of this chapter he's had sex with another underage girl after dosing her up on E, weed and alcohol and we get this rotten story about him trying to get her out of his apartment before another girl turns up...

I hated it when girls couldn't get the hint. Don't get me wrong, Rachel was gorgeous, and I had a great time railing her. She was one of the few girls that could make me cum hard without letting me fuck her in the ass.

Rachel also wouldn't shut the fuck up. The sound of her vomiting was getting on my nerves.

It was quiet as we walked out into the parking lot. I reached my hand down her shirt and gave her a passionate kiss. 
"You're incredible," I said.
"You too," she said with a smile. "Sorry I don't have my license yet, I'll get it soon enough."
"It's okay, cowgirl," I replied. "How long until you get it?"
"Soon!" she said enthusiastically. "I turn sixteen next month and my road test is scheduled the week after!"
"Great, be good," I said as I slammed the door of my Subaru and drove around the block to check my email.

And he proceeds to give precisely no shits about that bit of news.

She is fifteen-years-old. Fifteen! She is fucking fifteen Allan!


After several months of being shit at his job and being an absolutely repellent human being, Allan still somehow expects the reader to feel sorry for him because his job was slightly difficult. Eventually he decides to quit and like any unbalanced individual he figures the best way to do this is the following:

I started going through each room, each desk, each drawer, trying to find anything of Bella's that I could steal. There were personal lady items throughout. I grabbed one particularly intimate piece that I won't mention in fear of her reading this and pressing charges. I instantly got hard.

I pulled down all three layers of pants and my underwear. My bare ass sat on her comfy desk chair and I started furiously jerking off. With the smell of her tit sweat, and the fantasy of her catching me only to help me finish, I popped all over her computer desk and my hands.

He then then smears his seamen over "everything that people would touch", including three keyboards, the doorknobs, his boss's chair and her personal belongings. Finally he steals some valuables and makes his exit...

As I stormed out, I gawked at a little girl and her mother who were both dressed inappropriately. 
"Wow, your daughter is hot, I would love to fuck her!" I shouted.
The woman looked horrified and quickly grabbed her child and started shuffling off towards the lift. Maybe now she will think twice about dressing her daughter like a whore. 
"Yo bitch!" I shouted, "I work here! Welcome to the mountain you fucking slut!"

And there ends one of the bleakest books ever written.



Somehow this book is available for anyone to buy on Amazon. You might have got a sense of this already, but I'd not recommend it.


Just in case you were wondering what happened to Allan Saro he finished with a heart warming update on his life.

I eloped in downtown Hilo, Hawaii. To my beautiful wife HDR, without whom I would be lost. I currently reside in a quiet community in Pennsylvania, where I continue to write.

I'm sure, like me, you're all glad it all ended up working out swimmingly for Allan.



After reading the book through and being completely amazed that anyone would write anything this rotten and would want to actually put their name against these stories I reread the preface, looking for some sort of explanation. I didn't make much of the preface when I started reading the book, but after going through the experience some parts of it start making more sense.

My life has changed considerably since I first wrote this book. I got married, bought a house, and moved to the country. At the offset this book has been very off putting to most readers. I understood that when I first began to write it in October 2011. May goal was never to offend anyone.

You didn't want to offend anyone? Seriously? What the hell was the goal? What sort of person did you think wants to read a mix of; advice on taking up skiing/snowboarding, the dreary details about being a lift operator, all underlaid with insights into the life and thoughts of a sexual predator of young girls?

As a fair warning this book is extremely sexually charged. Despite heavy warning from not only my editor but also close friends and family I still believe the content of this book is worth exploring. 

It wasn't.

Then finally, because this single sentence surely makes everything all right, he throws in the big get-out-of-jail card....

It is 100 percent satire and should be taken as such.

One of two things is the truth; either this book is actually a grim insight  into the deranged character of Allan Saro and his activities, and he should probably be on some sort of register, or, he has created the single least satirical satire in all of written history.

I'll leave it to you to decide.


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Honest Snowboard Brand Slogans

April 23, 2014, 6:40 am
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Honest Slogans is a great single-theme Tumblr that imagines what would happen if companies used honest marketing slogans. It got us thinking what might happen to the world of snowboarding...



And they have too, check out Agnarchy's excellent spot
















One thing we spotted while doing this - The majority of snowboard brands were so bland that there was nothing interesting to say about them.



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Back to the Future - Checking up on the Olympic predictions

April 30, 2014, 6:35 am
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Immediately after I posted last week's honest slogans article, Brooke Geery from the YoBeat, dropped me a message to let me know that she'd LOL'd, then she had a stab at predicting the number of people who would read it. Her prediction was eerily spot-on, which means she's clearly some sort of internet witch. It got us wondering how good normal people are at predictions, because although everyone loves making predictions, usually no one bothers to check the results. We figured the best way to check was to see how different people's predictions panned out at the 'Lympics...

Here are the guys that thought they'd have a shot at predicting the snowboarding medals:

SkyBet(The bookie) - Representing the professional side of sports predictions and part of Rupert Murdock's evil project to rinse even more money out of the victims of his sinister media empire.

Bleacher Report(The internet content production machine) - In their efforts to trawl for readership they managed to churn out a full article before each and every Olympic event. Each article was written by a different poorly paid writer with no apparent background in snowboarding.

Examiner.com(The not-as-successful internet content production machine)- They just managed one article written by Jeremy Freeborn from Calgary, who spends 99% of his time writing about ice hockey and the rest predicting Olympic snowboarding results

Todd Richards(The insider) - Former snowboard pro and the mouthpiece of NBC's Olympic snowboard coverage, he's here representing snowboardkind.

Sport Myriad(The mentalist) - Beau Dure, a former sport journalist and now apparently mid-breakdown, writes this site under the tagline "More sports than are dreamed of in your philosophy". Fuck only knows what that's all about.

Sports Unbiased(The local) - The site of Zach Bigalke,  a man who hales from Jackson Hole, Wyoming and author of the book no one is talking about; Dispatches from Vancouver: A Non-Traditional Sports Fan in America's View of the XXI Winter Olympiad.

Infostrada Sports(The robot)-  The self-proclaimed "world leader in sports data", they've apparently built a super-computer, which produces predictions that they flog to businesses. Will computers put all the human predictors out of work?

Associated Press(The journalistic big guns) - These guys have been gathering the news and syndicating it to media companies since 1846, and that's before snowboarding was even invented! Over that time they've amassed 51 Pulitzers, although it's not clear how many of those were for soothsaying.

&

Sports Illustrated(Visual exploiters of women)



Let's see how they did. 

Predictions by event...



Lesson 1 - No one was able to predict the men's snowboard cross. It's just an extreme version of playing scissors, paper, stone. If you're a gambling man and you want to win big on the Olympic boardercross event, you're probably best just entering the event itself and seeing if you can do a Bradbury.

At the other end of the scale were the women's slopestyle and parallel grand slalom finals where there were a few hits. Let's take a look at them in a bit more detail to see what went on there.


Predictions by rider...


Lesson 2 - Jamie Anderson's win was uncannily predicable. Her win in the slopestyle was predicted by all but one of the writers and the one close prediction was also for her (Sports Unlimited thought she'd get silver). Interestingly no one predicted either of the other medallists in her event. You've got as much chance predicting a Jamie Anderson win as trying to predict any one of the top three finishers in any other event.

Lesson 3 - Shaun White missing out in the medals was statistically the biggest surprise. We all knew that, but it's just interesting to get the statistical confirmation.

Lesson 4 - Never bet on Lindsey Jacobellis in the Olympics. When will people learn?


Predictions by predictor...



Lesson 5 - All the money and clever techniques don't predict things any better than the guesses of some random blokes. (See above - Bunch of people making guesses on the left, bunch of big number crunching companies on the right). It's particularly interesting to see how poor the Infostrada results were, getting beaten by a succession of people who knew next to nothing about snowboarding*.

* The Examiner might have outperformed them too if they hadn't, by mistake, predicted the same medallists for the women's halfpipe that they did for the women's parallel grand slalom.

Lesson 6 - The bookmaker was the worst predictor, but they still win anyway. Because that's how gambling works suckers.

Lesson 7 - Todd Richards wins. You knew he would right? Even then he didn't do all that well, because...

Lesson 8 - Everyone was awful...


Overall predictions...

Despite having 219 punts between them, 30% of the eventual medallists weren't picked up at all by the predictors. The winner of the women's halfpipe, Kaitlyn Farrington, didn't get a mention, Vic Wild who won 20% of all the snowboard Olympic gold medals, was only mentioned three times in passing, and only the Bleacher Report had Sage Kotsenburg in their top three.

But that's only part of the overall story, here's the overview...


That's one big Pac Man of rubbish predicting. You have more chance of striking out entirely than of guessing any medallist and you've got next to no chance of predicting the winner. Next time you read a predictions article just bear in mind that statistically it's going to be bullshit, unless it's predicting an event Jamie Anderson is in, or if it was Brooke doing the predicting. In either of those two cases it's as good as fact and you might as well bet your kid's inheritance on it.



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If anyone wants to look at the data, it's available here.


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4 Things Isabella Laböcks' appearance in Playboy tells us about the current state of snowboarding

May 14, 2014, 7:27 am
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Over a year ago we put together an article looking at what was then a small trickle of professional snowboarders who had taken their kit off for publicity. At that time there were 7 ladies and 5 guys who had given it a try. One of the strange things we noticed around this year's Olympics was that in the space of a few months the total number of female athletes choosing to go down this route has more than doubled with another 8 taking the plunge. What does that mean for snowboarding?...

Trend 1. The number of women are taking their clothes off for publicity has increased rapidly

The trickle hasn't exactly turned into a flood yet, but at this rate, by the time we get to the next Olympics will there be any female snowboarders who will actually be wearing clothes?


Ina Meschik
Parallel Giant Slalom - 4th
We included a bunch of photos from her bonkers photo shoot in Top TENuous 12, which included this just slightly suggestive shot.




Alena Zavarzina
Parallel Giant Slalom - Bronze
Alena was caught suffering from an awkward wardrobe malfunction while frolicking with fellow professional snowboarder Alena Alekhine, in a shoot for a Russian magazine we spotted in Top TENous 11.




Julia Dujmovits
Parallel Slalom - Gold
Julia was another snowboarder we spotted in Top TENous 11 and she loves getting involved in any photo shoot. Since then, she won gold in the parallel slalom and we found a few more pictures.






Although to be fair, Julia Dujmovits, doesn't dress like this to be raunchy, she is genuinely dressing disabled...




Valeruya Tsoy
Parallel Slalom - 32nd Place
Valeruya proved to be the Anna Kournikova of snowboarding and she made an appearance in Top TENuous 10.




Deborah Antonioz
Snowboard Cross - Quarter Finals
Deborah, didn't get all that far this time out but she won silver in the same event in Vancouver and she featured in the latest addition of Top TENuous.



Trend 2. Men don't get anywhere near the same value from baring all.

That's now 15 women to 5 men choosing this publicity route in a sport where the majority of participants are male. That's a very significant difference, particularly given that none of this recent crop were men. It indicates that the publicity benefits for this type of photo soot are heavily weighted towards women, as are the pitfalls.


Elena Hight
Halfpipe - Although she make the US team for Sochi.
But she did take over the role of ESPN body edition's snowboarding representation from the previous occupants Louie Vito (the last man to try this) and Gretchen Bleiler, who featured in our original article.




And she got her baps out in one of the most awkward photo shoot set-ups in all of snowboarding history...



Trend 3. It is escalating not just in terms of the number of people, but in the amount of clothes taken off

After our original article one of the riders we featured, Alexis White, left this comment:

"There was always pressure to pump your female career thru your sexuality if you had some sex appeal, I did, I did it, it's strange and I'm glad I am not in this arena with that kind of pressure any more! Thank God I never did Playboy or anything! I regret nothing and I am glad I am past it."


And now that line has now been crossed...

Isabella Laböck
Parallel Giant Slalom - 1/8 Finals


"Ski-Cross-Ass", the least complimentary way they could possibly find to introduce an Olympic skier


And of course got also her baps out...



Oh right...




You know your not famous enough to do this when you have to write your name on all the photos





In front of massive tea cup


In the massive tea cup

Pretending to be a sexy tea bag

& making the water suspiciously bubbly


4. The less popular the snowboarding event, the less clothes the snowboarders wear

You might have noticed the majority of the riders featured here were slalom competitors (6 out of 8). Slalom has been experiencing declining fortunes for years now, and once again it was the snowboarding event that got the least coverage and viewers at the Olympics:

The more the fortunes of slalom decline, the more the competitors will disrobe in the hunt for more coverage to try and increase their sponsorship money. Just by looking at the stickers on Isabella Laböck's snowboard you can see the difficulty these athletes already have attracting sponsorship. The more the fortunes of alpine snowboarding fall the more likely we are to see this kind of thing in the future.

Extra points to the industrial conveyor manufacturer Budde for their inadvertent cock and balls logo. 




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The original article: The Hypersexualisation of Snowboarding


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Alibaba and the 40,000 Crappy Snowboards

May 29, 2014, 7:36 am
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The Chinese eCommerce group Alibaba is about to go public in what is expected to be the largest tech IPO of all time. 80% of everything sold online in China goes through this company and they flog more merchandise than Amazon and eBay combined. It's not a company most people outside China are familiar with, so we figured we'd take a look and see what all the excitement is about...


The Alibaba.com site puts manufactures in touch with importers and when we ran a search for 'snowboard' things didn't get off to a good start. This was the 5th result:

Neither a snowboard nor a set of plastic children.



Next in line was this:

A two-for-one deal? Bonus!


On the first page of 20 results, along with these two, there was an inflatable sledge, 5 plastic snowboards, a set of dual snowboards, an LED snowboard and a snowboard that thought it was a binding. That's not a good hit rate. But it's not just reams of shonky made-in-China tat that you can buy on Alibaba.com, you can buy crap from all around the world.

Austria's only product was this set of ground-breaking snowboard bindings

"We created a new binding concept to uplift the entire snowboarding world: the Strap-in"



In an uncanny representation of the generation-long shift in manufacturing to China from the USA, this was the US contribution.


On the plus side we were really pleased to see that South Korea is still absolutely rocking the fuck out, with their incredible snowboard fashions and awesome model poses. Here are a few of our favourite ones:

South Korea - putting the swag in swagger.



A good chunk of the world's snowboards are now manufactured in China, but I think there's some way to go before the companies out there start pushing their own brands into other markets. Here's a glimpse into the current state of snowboard marketing in China from local manufacturer Haisky:

From this day forth I'm always going to refer to my bindings as 'feet tramples'


Snowboard graphics have got some way to go too...



Amongst all their horrible own designs was this one by French company Windlip snowboards...

Chinese version / French version


It's not clear on how legitimate that is (I think they may have some part in the production of some of the Windlip snoabords), but it lead us to a few even more dubious snowboards you can buy. From a series of questioningly separate dealers in Slovakia, Ukraine and Moldova, you can buy batches of the Briana Banks Sims Fader board from 2004.



Seems highly unlikely they have batches of unsold Sims boards from 10 years ago, so your're pretty much guaranteed to either, never see your money again, or get a very shitty reproduction. Either way it's still probably a better way of spending your money, than forking out the $4,000 someone is currently trying to flog an original one on eBay for.


My favourite knock-offs by far are these Arbor boards currently being sold on Alibaba's version of eBay in China, Taobao.com. They've not even tried to make these things even remotely look like an Arbor design and they've got the balls to ask for a hefty $480 per board.

New for the 2014/15 season, decorated with all sorts of Halloween clip art, comes the Arbor Prospect.

And even better is the 2014/15 Arbor Sequence with it's karaoking werewolves. 


Alibaba is a company that could ultimately be valued at more than $16 billion, and as far as we can see it's full of tat, dual snowboards, and shonky knock-offs. All things considered, when the opportunity arises, I'll probably not be adding these guys to my diverse stock portfolio.



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Online Snowboarding Like It's 1999

June 12, 2014, 6:23 am
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At the dawn of the internet, a service called the Internet Archive started diligently recording the history of all websites. This week we use the Internet Archive to explore the early stumblings of snowboarding in the digital age and plunge into a wonderful world of intro screens, black backgrounds, gifs and step-in bindings...


Burton 1996

We start our exploration of the end of the last millennium with the big swinging dicks of snowboarding, who back then were sporting a classic intro screen, a website width that would just about work on one of today's shittiest mobile phones, and an incredibly styled-out crotch shot.

The crotch shot gave their demands to enter them now! a really sinister edge.

And as was a standard of the time, the crotch guy was magicked up using the very latest gif technology. Here it is in it's full gory:


OK. That was pretty underwhelming, but what they lacked in excitement, they made up for in volume. Here are a few other awesome examples. Keep and eye out for their strange focus on the awkward moments of riders trying to spot their landings. Maybe that was a much bigger thing back then.




The other thing that was big last century, according to the Burton site, were the use of the word 'hip' and Jake Burton's awful predictions:

"Who can say if the trend is more fueled [sic] by the freedom of expression and air time riding allows for, or the sport's winning number in the lotto of cool and hip. No one could have imagined it thus far, not even Jake Burton, owner of the world's leading snowboarding company. As he admitted in and ESPN interview, he was once unsure of snowboarding's future but he now sees it totally eclipsing skiing."



Mervin 1997

Mervin, made no promises, but still managed to beat the general trend and produce a website and marketing strategy that was 100% more epic than their current one.


"Since our founder Mike Olson, established Lib Tech based on the business philosophies of pollution, petroleum, and profit, we have led the industry on every competitive front. We not only realized huge profits developing plastic winter toys for children of wealthy capitalist pig dogs, but at the same time we've built a manufacturing/marketing juggernaut of daunting proportions. Furthermore, by expanding our manufacturing facilities and giving the guy in marketing a raise we've insured our future as the leader in the snowboard market."





Sims 1998

Sims had this awesome 90s team page, featuring a stunning combination of boring fonts, drab colours and crappy graphics


and they had another choice gif

I swear she almost got a grab in there



Here's a few more great old school gifs we found on our travels...

The Gifs That Just Keep Giving

Vans 1997


Scott 1998



Lamar 1997
Kevin Jones F-sid......, Kevin Jones F-side 720....., Kevin Jones F.. oh for fucks sake.


Ride 1998


And of course who could forget...

Device 1997


The late 90's were mad for step-in bindings, and Device is in here to represent that trend. They've got some classic gifs, some really strange snowboard boots with integrated spurs, and they were well chuffed about their latest win:  "Device wins Snow Country magazine Step-In binding of the year!"


Device and Snow Country magazine have since gone out of business.



Funny thing fashion. Step-ins ultimately never made it, but novelty hats, they're still going strong...

Screamer Hats 1997

Shitty intro screen: check

Shitty menu screen: check

Awesome 90's gif: cheek.


Screamer hats are very much still around, helping to clearly signpost twats by providing them with clear novelty hat markings.



Dipping to this century, just after every computer on earth narrowly avoided being destroyed by the millennium bug, there's a couple of sites that also need a mention:

Winterstick 2002 

The early noughties saw the simple website intro screen superseded by the even more time-wasting intro video. Winterstick's is the only one we can still find functioning and it's bloody brilliant. With some seriously grimey bass it's well worth a look.


Shaun White 2001


How old does thsi make you feel? We found Shaun White's website from when he was just a 14-yer-old whippersnapper. His whole snowboarding career has been and gone since then, but his website was pretty much the same thing; pictures of Shaun dressing up and gurning, and having an entourage of people working on his publicity.

"1.30.01 - I just got these skate photo's. They are of me skating at the YMCA. It was a super fun day and we shot photo's for a couple of hours. I had a wig on too which rocked. Check out these photos, also if you have aol don't click on the thumbnails yet, you will have to go to the photo section. Apperently AOL doesnt support the code that Microsoft does, my programmer is working on it. So hold tight."



Let's finish with the mags....

Yobeat 1997

Here's Yobeat introducing people to the future of snowboard publishing with their awesome background,  heinous logo and a site that's all lit-up like an electric blue disco Knight Rider

They later updated their logo, to this one inspired by a deflated cock.



Whitelines 2000

Whiteline's first website was short and to the point




Transworld Snowboarding 1998

Transworld launched into this brave new world with the worst menu they could possibly create


One of the multitude of pages they created was an actual, old timey chat room, which for some reason they have since thoroughly distanced themselves from. I wish their site had a little more of this sort of thing these days...

bumblefuck: Jim rippey is a fucking cocky, asshole!he is so damn generic too! He did a shit load of his stupid gay ass , trendy flips at the x games. is that all he can do!?? i'm glad the ass-fuck couldn't land a double flip at the big air. the dumb ass did a flip at the border x too, give me a fucking break, he thinks he rocks just cause he does flips all the time. what a fag. try something new jim any thing but thoseflips you do everytime! oh yeah victoria jealouse rules!i'd love to ride with her and some other stuff, he he. if anybody is gonna be a killington this week e-mail me. c-ya, ride on where the fuck is the snow???????

twentyfourseven: hey bumblefuck, youre right about the flips and stuff, they suck. But Rippey is still the UNDISPUTED KING of cliff seven twentys. thats all i gotta say. later

bumblefuck: that's true, but he's still an ass fucker

Charles Kenna: this piece that i write is the shit because no other can match it

One pissed skater: All so-called 'AGRESSIVE INLINERS' can eat a fucking dick. All you pussies do is take up space and time at the fucking parks. I don't want to hear you whine about not getting respect becuase you don't give it to us and you don't deserve it. Rollerbladers can eat a big fat dick.

Gay Bob: SKIERS SUCK THERE COCKY AND ALWAYS IN THE WAY. do me a favor if you see one kill em if you are one kill yourself.

DB5: THE CHAT ROOM IS FUCKED!!!!!!!!




Snowboarder Mag 1998

They went with your standard crappy intro screen with a gif


And also went with the mega menu approach




And finally, there was Snowboard Magazine who back at the start of the century brought a very different angle to snowboard reportage...

Snowboard Mag 2001









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Marc Frank Montoya and the Pyramid Scheme

July 17, 2014, 7:01 am
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Over the past few years former pro snowboarder and amateur gangster, Marc Frank Montoya, has been re-inventing himself as a "Financial Freedom Specialist". It all sounded amusingly bonkers, but unfortunately underneath his veneer of blag, the ways he's chosen to money off the back of his snowboarding legacy are really sinister...


To become a financial guru you'd think you'd need a strong history of success in business and Marc Frank Montoya (MFM) is not afraid to claim that he's the dog's bollocks. This is how he describes his business background on his website:

How I went from "HOOD TO GREAT"

Discover How I Went From A Struggling "Hustler", To A World-Class Professional Athlete Building Several Million Dollar Businesses As A Serial Entrepreneur!


And on his Linkedin profile, complete with resplendent smugshot, he's claiming near Jedi-level business skills



Let's take a look at those claims by taking a trip through the rest of his Linkedin profile...

So that's just an incredibly wank way of saying he was a professional snowboarder. Well that bit of his profile is no surprise, but what about his claim to be a successful entrepreneur?


That didn't work out so well. He went into business with a really shady character called "Liko" Smith who was the brother of his then wife. The hotels had to be sold off after a few years when Liko Smith, who ran the business, was arrested for owing $200,000 in taxes. MFM was only really an investor rather than the person who ran the joint, but he lost a whole load of money on that bet.

Dead. Let's mark that up as failure two of two.

That's also gone and is now just a front page for the last thing on his résumé, we'll get to that in a minute. Three from three.


On top of those three there's been a series of other business attempts that he's chosen not to include on his Linkedin profile including:

  • Federal Skateboards - Dead
  • Sound Outerwear - Unsound
  • Biltrite Snowboards - Biltnotsorite
  • DumbFounded PerduKshinz, a DJ business - Dumbfounded


A bunch of failed investments, failed businesses and one zombie website is not the definition of being a serial entrepreneur. It's like a guy with a record-breaking premature ejaculation problem claiming he's a legendary swordsman.

With no sign of any actual business successes, this guy is surely in no position to be handing out financial advice, unless that advice is on how to lose money prolifically.

At this point MFM realised that he was about as good at business as he was at lip-synching hip-hop, so he looked for another way to make money, which leads us on to the most recent part of his career - scamming people.

These two businesses (and the zombie site) are the same turd polished in slightly different ways. There's a good article on Whitelines which takes a look at his most recent reinvention "Financial Freedom Specialist", but what they don't get quite right is how he makes his money. He doesn't make money just by flogging DVDs, the really sinister money behind this site is in the 'Mandatory Trainings' [sic] section. That section, and the whole focus of the other site, is on a scheme called multi-level marketing.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) sounds pretty innocent, but what it is in this case is one tiny grey step away from a good old-fashioned pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes, where the whole charade is based on the collection and redistribution of joining fees from new people to people further up the hierarchy, are of course illegal. To avoid the whole awkward jail bit, companies need to offer some sort of product or service to be involved and pretty often that product can be as nominal as 'wealth advice'.

MFM has joined up with an outfit called the Empower Network, a company set-up by a couple of very dodgy blokes based out of the hotbed of business success and convenient taxes, Costa Rica. Empower Network is really at the very sketchy end of the MLM schemes, because although they do offer a service, their service is pretty much just a garnish for the joining fees.



You pay in about $5,000 to join/get trained (you won't get that back) and for that you get some spurious advice on how to make money from blogging and a site of your own (which is build on Wordpress, a product you can get hold of without these guys for the very reasonable price of no money). Approximately $4,000 of that fee goes to the person that gets you to buy in and $1,000 goes up the chain to the guys at the top. You can then hope to make about $100 a month form blogging and for the volume of work involved $100 is a shitty amount of money and it would take years just to break even. But for most people it's even worse, as around 90% of the people who sign-up to this scheme stand to make no money at all.

The real way to make money in this scheme is not to blog, but to sell the idea to more people. Instead of the minimal $1,200 a year you could make from blogging about something like snowboarding, if you blog and talk about Empower Network and you managed to sign-up one person a month you'll make $48,000. That's a huge incentive for the people in the network to behave exactly like they would in a pyramid scheme and it all operates on the basis of exploiting a lot of people who lose money.

TL;DR You have to pay to join, and if you have to pay a company to work for them, it's a scam.

Also another warning sign is that if someone has to spend any time explaining how their business is not a pyramid scheme, it's a pyramid scheme. Here's MFM doing just that.


Sure buddy, it's not a pyramid scheme, and this isn't one of the most worst examples of misogyny in snowboarding history...

source


So MFM is spending a lot of time and making a lot of money from signing people up to Empower Networks and the first group of people he's been targeting are sadly the people who supported him when he was a snowboarder. Interesting way to thank them. Here's a couple of relevant comments from the EasyLounging forum.

Distric - One of my friends is selling that shit for MFM. imo, he lures shred kids in with the vision of being one of his "friends" having meetings at his house and going to bars with him. Friend has tried to get me to go. I want nothing to do with it.

He's basically a financial Jimmy Saville

MFM claims that juice healed his knee. whatever

Good point. I forgot to mention that he used to also front up another multi-level marketing company that hucks miracle drinks called Monavie. There's another thing he didn't mention on his Linkedin profile.


drjcv - I've got a buddy that constantly gets hooked by the latest mlm thing, it doesn't matter how many he gets involved in he never seems to learn.

The fundamental thing about any mlm scheme is that its not about selling the product, its about signing people up. usually there is a couple hundred dollar sign up fee. The idea is you sell "financial freedom" to people. you hook people in by saying all they have to do is sign people up (and the people you sign up supposedly start making money from the people they sign up who makes money from....)

So you have a guy like MFM, who is successful and charismatic at the top of the pyramid (which has multi levels btw, that's where the name comes from) actually making some money, but no one else does, you're just a brick in the pyramid and the point at the top is embedded in MFM's sphincter.

Arsehole highlighted


The thing is that by getting involved with Empower Network Marc Frank Montoya is falling for the same bullshit. He's not at the top of these pyramids, he's a making money, but he's also being taken advantage of. It's a mugs game and he's a bit part player.

To up the irony, remember the guy that took large sums of his money and lost in on the Block Hotel? Liko Smith "The World's Most Extreme CEO", is involved in these schemes too and more than likely he's the one that got MFM involved. It takes some kind of special sucker to fall for that shit twice.

[Edit: It seems that Liko Smith's site has just been pulled down for legal reasons. Here's the archived version]


As good as Marc Frank Montoya was at snowboarding, what he's been doing off the mountains has really tarnished whatever credit he had instead of building something on it. By embracing these exploitative get-rich-quick schemes and targeting the people who used to be his supporters MFM is rapidly turning into a rotten legacy for snowboarding.




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July 24, 2014, 6:48 am
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The 5 Best Moments in the Incredible 1985 Swingbo Promo Video

July 29, 2014, 5:53 am
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The Swingbo was a classic a-bit-like-a-snowboard-but-not-as-good-as-a-snowboard invention that flared up in Germany in the early 80s before dying a quick and merciful death. Like all modern inventions it was launched with a marketing burst and a promo video, and someone has been nice enough to post it on the YouTube. Here's what we found....



5. It stars a guy called...

Best name in the business

Fuzzy Garhammer, jobtitle: "Freestyle Ski-Pope", was one of the founders of freestyle skiing. No, not that sort of freestyle skiing, this sort of freestyle skiing...


"Fuzzy Garhammer appears on the scene wearing a Neapolitan straw hat." What an absolute leg end.


Here he is again on the left with that incredible hat and presumably his life partner.



4. This crash...

Watch in amazement as the second guy's Swingbo instantly turns into a suppository.



3. Ironically I found this video on Cross Board's Twitter

If you're trying to promote your new two-planks-attached-to-a-board-on-snow design, it's best not to parody yourself by alerting everyone to the fact that the concept has failed miserably at least once before.

But now they've brought it to our attention, here's a look at the Swingbo and their attempts at marketing...


"The new way: Swingbo" - Do you swing both ways?


"A marvellous enlargement of winter sports pleasure - a tingling challenge!"The most innuendo-filled line of marketing spiel ever: 


Followed by the most defeatist bit of past-tense marketing ever; "A new winter sport who caused enthusiasm!" 



2. This epic slow-motion three-man synchronised winding-down-the-windows shot...


It's mesmeric.



1. These amazing suits...


Just look at those jaunty SKI banana henchmen wriggle! 


Swingbo didn't just try to reinvent the snowboard, they also had a stab at reinventing fashion and the results were far more spectacular than the Swingbo itself...

The Bertie Basset look


The cast of Cats


In hindsight it's no surprise that the naked crotch style never took off.


But the pièce de résistance, even beating the lady with nothing covering her modesty other than a pair of pink leg-warmers, is the full eye-wateringly colourful line-up of neon outfits...

Swingbo - The most colourfully awesome thing ever to almost happen to snowboarding



Anyway, if you fancy watching eight and a half minutes of shitty almost-boarding to the sound of pan pipes, then you can experience the whole thing here. Spoiler: I've just shown you all the best bits.




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Reinventing the Snowboard, Take 47,564 - The Cross Board


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Crappy Stock Photography of the Week: Snowboarding in Business Suits

August 7, 2014, 4:38 am
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Stock photography is a very strange business, with thousands of photographers around the world trying to eke out a living by trying to anticipate the visual fodder needs of editors or designers. One of the scenarios a numbers of these guys have decided could be the next big requirement is photos of snowboarders in business suits, and some of the results are quite special...


We start off with the quintessential businessman...


 Don Draper


Here's the Mad Man hard-booting. 




I don't know what's worse here, the get-up this lad is sporting, or the desecration of a snowboard used as as a monoski.


Gimpy the snowboarder on his way to the prom....no snow.



Kulfoto's definition of a 'funny picture' doesn't make me think the rest of their site is going to be a laugh riot.



Natty matching boots and board snowboarding businessman, bunny hops the shit out of this picture.


"Just use one foot Glen, no one will notice."


Equal opportunities...to look fucking stupid in a business suit.


Business suit, snowboarding, selfies.


That last lady had got this whole business suit stock photography gig down pat. Here's my favourite example of her oeuvre...



All those are great, but this stuff gets even stranger when you turn it into gifs...




Ian Brown, The Stone Roses front man gurning like a champion.



"I'm the king of the world!"


Here's that epic snowboarding businessman crotch shot


This guy is the happiest ginger man snowboarding in a business suit since...

Well, since this...


What a dick. God I'm going to miss this guy. 




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Nazis, Supermen, Nipple Clamps and Baking - 4 More Snowboard Books Reviewed

August 14, 2014, 7:03 am
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After a number of years of reviewing books on this site, I think I'm probably now the world's foremost expert on ski resort based literature. Sit back and bask in my knowledge as I use all that experience to review four more snowboarding books...


Chalet Boy - by Andy Smith

Spoiler alert: This book is about as interesting as its cover

Welcome to the tedious and inane whingefest of the 31 year-old chalet boy Andy Smith. This is the memoires of the entirely unlikeable man who spent an entirely unmemorable season in the Alps.

Every year hundreds of people head to the mountains to do two things: take up low-paid menial jobs that allow them to spend the rest of their time snowboarding and/or partying. Andy Smith unfortunately didn't get the memo about the second part of that deal, then he wrote this book detailing his five months of cleaning and cooking exploits. This is an example of the kind of excitement you're in for if you read this book:

"I was really worried I was going to mess the carving up and ruin Christmas dinner for everyone. Dan and Tom had done a great job of preparing the birds in advance with stuffing and covering them with bacon and they looked fantastic as they came out of the oven. I needn't have worried because when the time came I managed to do a pretty decent job and all the plates went out with the neatly cut slices of juicy Christmas meat on them."

Phew!

In addition to being a bore, Andy Smith is also a miserable piece of work. During another bout of whittering on about some cooking, he stepped things up a bit with some casual racism...

"My feeling was that our menu is way too sophisticated for Welsh taste buds (plus it contains no lamb)"

Which is about the most interesting thing about the book.


Chalet Boy - The Diary of My First Ski Season (Aged 31) in a pie chart:




As far as I can tell only two interesting things have ever happened to Andy Smith:

One was when he tried to promote his book on Snowboarding Forum, only to get torn a new one.

And the other was when he actually did tear himself a new one. When he was nine years-old he decided not to shit any more and a few days later he fainted trying to expel the inevitable massive turd:

"As the fog of passing out cleared and clarity returned, I realised I was on the floor with blood from both my head and my arse creating a terrible mess. As if that wasn't a bad enough scenario, I still had half of the 'iceberg' left to dislodge. I clumsily made my way back onto the toilet to pass what felt like a sandpaper covered marrow before desperately calling my mother to come and make sense of all of this mess."


Today Andy Smith is boring the Internet to death via his blog about the food he eats.

The book is here if you want to read it (you don't).



The Werwolf on Eagle's Nest Mountain - by Susan Hira


I'll happily admit I acquired this book purely because of the cover. 


This one has a swanky intro video to save me having to explain the plot...


As a bad writer you're faced with two choices, either practice and get better before you publish a book, or just don't write a book at all. There are however a lot of bad writers that ignore these simple choices and think that the best solution is to write books for kids, because kids are mugs. Susan Hira is one of these writers.

Here are the four highlights of the book:

1. Early on someone fires a machine gun at some of the kids who are on a chair lift. The kids are a little shaken up by the ordeal, they head back to the hotel, everyone talks about it for a bit, no one suggests options like leaving or calling the police, the holiday continues.

2. One of the girls later finds out about a Nazi conspiracy that endangers her and all her friends, but she gets distracted by the smell of a tasty soup. She instantly forgets Nazi conspiracy as a result.

3. This sentence: "Doesn't hurt that Nick has always admired her spunk."

4. Hitler's octogenarian daughter, who has only tried snowboarding once before, scythes down one of the baddies with her snowboard mid backside seven twenty.

The book is available here and it's a sandpaper covered marrow of crap.




Clamped - by David Blackwell


The first thing you notice about this book, other than the epic use of Microsoft Paint on the cover, is that David Blackwell is addicted to similes. He's constructed his entire book out of them, and when you're trying to produce a whole book of similes some of them become a real reach. Here's just three choice examples from the opening page:

"The impact came, and Ben collapsed like a bag of used body parts being thrown from the back of a hospital, his bone marrow rattling inside his skeleton as it slammed into the snow."

"The girl had risen and skied away, floating over the piste like steam unfurling from an espresso."

"He prized himself away from his past life, like a metallic spatula scraping a greasy egg out of an old frying pan, and flipped himself into the mountains."

As you can see, as well as being one of the foremost simile crammers of our generation, he's also an exponent of the flowery adjective. Through that fist page we also get treated to, "playful shadows", "sumptuous eyes" and "fizzing eyes", which sounds fucking painful.

One of my favourite adjective-laden passages was this one describing one of the main characters:

"Malio was a huge, heavy, meat rack of a man. Breeze blocks for feet, his legs solid and thick like those of a gout-ridden hippo. ... Welded to his stout body were two piston arms, pumped full of dark blood. ... He looked as though he could break things with his bare hands."

OK, he lost it for a moment with that last sentence. Just in case it wasn't clear, Malio is a baddy.

But by far the best sentence in the book, which combined both his incredible adjectives and bonkers similes, is this one:

"Both boys were hizz-whizzing down the slope, crouched up like they were about to get a spanking from their headmaster, buttocks high in the air, clenched."

WTF?

While we're in this very dubious place though, we might as well discuss the plot of the book. It all revolves around an ancient set of nipple clamps that have been acquired for the Courchevel erotica museum (which is sadly fictitious). It involves a couple of skiers who become male prostitutes for the season, a bunch of criminals slaughtering various people to get hold of the clamp and a couple of chalet boys/snowboarders that get caught up in the whole palava. It's kinda what you would get if you mixed Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels together with 50 Shades of Grey (not that I've read it or anything) and fluffed it all up with a ton of adjectives and similes.

It wasn't a good book, but is wasn't the worst either and if your really struggling for something to read it's probably worth a go, if nothing else it's a change to see someone try to write a novel based in a ski resort that isn't about the standard shit that happens in a ski resort.

Clamped was written back in 2005, David Blackwell hasn't written any other books since and probably the best bit of it is his promotional website which is still live. Shame he didn't get into blogging really...



Book is here if you wanna get it.




The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance - by Steven Kotler

Unfortunately not a book about an inter-dimensional ghost octopus attacking Travis Rice as advertised.


This one came out recently, had a lot of marketing money behind it and has been doing the rounds so I thought I'd get involved too, and like the Nazis book, I get to save some time because there's also an intro video complete with epic background music...


But that's where the similarities with the Nazi book end because this one isn't shit. It's a book that introduces the theory of the psychology of Flow through the stories of a range of action sports stars including our very own Travis Rice and Jeremy Jones. It's an interesting way of approaching the subject and it's pretty much guaranteed to be the only book about snowboarding where you'll read a passage like this...

"We've seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation's worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether."

It' all a tad hyperbolic.

It's the one shortcoming of this book that Steven Kotler, a journalist, writes as if he's part scientist and part self-help guru, which did get on my tits after a while. Reading this book won't change your life, like the marketing implies, but it will help explain those fleeting moments of flow that we've all felt snowboarding at some time and continue to strive to re-experience.

On the plus side, what other book about psychology can you also be regaled with (nicely in keeping with the way this article has been progressing in general) an impressive anal anecdote, from the experiences of the BASE jumper Dean Potter:

Potter landed in a heap on the cave floor. His hands were destroyed, other parts as well. He'd torn all the muscles in his stomach and his rectum. "I blew out my ass," he says "I didn't even know that was possible."

You learn something new everyday; sometimes, thankfully, through other people's experiences.


The book is here and the fancy marketing website is here.




You Might Also Like...

If you can't be bothered to wade through all of The Rise of Superman, we summed up the theory of Flow rather succinctly here: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow & Why You Love Snowboarding

Or take a look at the 16 other books we've reviewed so far.

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