Men’s Journal
Issue: September, 2005
Assignment: Fashion feature profiling unique outdoor and action sport stars.

HED: Keepers Of The Flame
DEK: Forget Old School vs. New School: These athletes do both. By combining the traditions of the past with the thrill of the new, they’re expanding the horizons of their sports.

Todd Richards
Snowboarder

At 35, Todd Richards is an aberration. Most snowboarders his age drift quiety toward easy-on-the-joints powder riding, but Richards remains a force to be reckoned with in the sport’s true proving ground: the terrain park. He finished a formidable fifth in the slopestyle event at the most recent Winter X Games, his eighth appearance there. An innovator who invented several now-standard half-pipe tricks, Richards’s career nearly spans snowboarding’s entire history. But he’s also acutely aware that snowboarding’s inherent youth has its downside. “The sport is so young, sometimes we don’t recognize our roots,” he says. He was furious when younger riders heckled legend Terje Haakonsen at the last Winter X Games for displaying a classic run that wasn’t full of the latest tricks. “I’m in a position where kids listen to my opinion,” he says. “It’s my responsibility to educate them on where this sport came rom.” So he’s seeking an analyst positioin on NBC’s 2006 Winter Olympics broadcast, and he’s featured in the upcoming snowboard documentary First Descent, which hopes to do for the sport what Dogtown and Z-boys did for skateboarding.

Mark Mendelblatt
Sailor

“I developed a strategic mind at a younger age out of necessity,” says Mark Mendelblatt, “because that’s what I had to do to beat the older, stronger sailors.” By older sailors, he means the 15-year-olds he beat at the 1984 National Championships, which he won at the tender age of 10. Since then, the technology of sailing has progressed at a rapid pace, but the art of sailing — reading wind and currents, positioning a boat for a regatta’s frantic start — hasn’t changed a bit. Mendelblatt’s innate ability to do all of the above is reflected on his resume: crewing on the OneWorld campaign in the 2003 America’s Cup, an eighth-place finish in the Laser class at the 2004 Olympics, and a win at last March’s Bacardi Cup just months after taking up Star class racing. This summer, the legendary Paul Cayard tapped Mendelblatt for his campaign in the new Transpac 52 class, recognition that Mendelblatt’s skills cover every type of sailing. “Once you know the limitations of a specific boat,” says Mendelblatt, “tactics are tactics.”

Joel Tudor
Surfer

Surfing’s “New School” turned the sport on its ear in the ’90s with radical lip-smashing maneuvers and skateboard-style aerials. But while legions of California kids were becoming slavishly devoted to the new tool of choice, the shortboard thruster, a teenage Joel Tudor was traveling the world with Australian surfing legend Nat Young, learning to ride boards of every size and shape in any kind of waves with surfing’s forefathers. They groomed Tudor, 29, into arguably the most well-rounded surfer on the planet. One of the first true longboard innovators in a generation, he matches groovy ’70s-style noseriding and carving with balls-out guts in waves that send other surfers scurrying for the beach. And every winter, Tudor brings his shortboard to Oahu, where he catches death-defying tube rides at Pipeline, garnering comparisons to the New School’s biggest names.

Tudor also merges tradition with innovation as a board-shaper. His impressive quiver of shortboard and longboard designs combine such time-tested concepts as the single fin and the diamond tail with contemporary advances like down rails and concave bottoms. The boards give older surfers flashbacks, but they mimic the performance of those cookie-cutter shortboard thrusters. “When I was 17,” says Tudor, “an old pro named Robbie Pagea nd I were paddling out when this kid went flying by us with the hugest grin on his face. I’m constantly looking to keep that smile going. If it means going through the last 50 years of board design to do it, then so be it.”

Shane Szocs
Skier

The freestyle revolution began in the mid ’90s, when a group of Canadian mogul skiers adapted two planks to the terrain park. By tweaking their aerials into bizarre new positions and sliding the rails and boxes invented for snowboarding, they redefined the sport for the PlayStation generation. Shane Szocs, 32, was an early member of this so-called New Canadian Air Force. But as the tricks and techniques accelerated at a blazing pace, he felt that appreciation for the sport’s roots was vanishing in the wake. “Big mountains are what skiing was built on hundreds of years ago,” he says, explaining why he moved away from the terrain park in 2000. Szocs now spends his winters exploring the backcountry