Skiing Magazine
Issue: November, 2007
Assignment: In-depth look at the business of professional skiing and the relative levels of success achieved by paid pros.
DEK: It’s nearly impossible to get rich skiing. But for those who can, is it even worth it?

Mike Douglas and cinematographer Ben Mullin stand on a frozen lake deep in the Coast Mountains outside of Pemberton, British Columbia. Above them, a short but impossibly narrow cleft in a rock face presents an opportunity for a dicey straightline that, properly filmed, could make a money shot for the team video Douglas directs and produces for Salomon Japan. They debate a variety of angles before settling on a standard “barbie” shot from across the lake.
“If he was any other rider, I wouldn’t ask his opinion,” Mullin explains. “But he’s signing my paychecks.”

“I’m bossy,” Douglas agrees.

A short snowmobile ride later, Douglas appears at the top of the cleft. Before dropping in, he takes care of a second bit of business—donning a helmet camera in order to capture the footage for his all-POV segment in the upcoming Matchstick Movie, Seven Sunny Days. He radios to Mullin, makes a few set-up turns, and flashes the line.

Two days later, Douglas sits in a Whistler Cafe at ten in the morning. He’s been up since before seven, in meetings with Salomon’s international marketing crew before they head back to France. Over a plate of eggs benedict, he tries to reconstruct the week.

“Let’s see…” he begins. “I met with Whistler Blackcomb about their spring advertising shoots and MC’ed a party for them. I’ve had Mullin here for two weeks, directing shoots for the Salomon movie. I’ve been filming my segment for MSP. I met with Salomon regarding team planning and product, and always in the back of my mind I’m planning this up-coming shoot, things we need to do and what we need to rent. I hung out with my in-laws … tried to keep my pregnant wife from killing me…”

By nearly any relevant metric—exposure, income, portfolio, respect—Mike Douglas is among the most successful professional freeskiers in the world. At 37, he’s also one of the oldest. But there’s one key metric by which Douglas will be the first to tell you he doesn’t entirely measure up: raw ability.

That’s because there’s a whole lot more to success in the notoriously fickle, relatively impoverished arena of professional skiing than you’d ever guess from the glossy images gracing the advertisements in this magazine. Behind those images of superhero skiers dancing with gravity down an Alaskan face is a person dancing in the political crosswinds of sponsorship in an ever-changing market while desperately trying to avoid injury.

There are 150-to-200 skiers in North America and Europe claiming to be professional freeskiers. Douglas is one of a fraction of them actually making a living doing it.

Brant Moles is representative of the other side of that fraction. He was supposed to be the next big thing in big mountain skiing. After the sport’s formative years were dominated by the likes of McConkey, Kreitler, and Morrison, Moles’ wins at the 1997 U.S. and World Extreme Skiing Championships symbolized a new depth of field and fresh personalities. He thought he’d won the lottery when the ensuing contracts allowed him to pay off a 10,000-dollar credit card bill and cover a spring’s worth of skiing in Alaska. Then he suffered four hip dislocations and a broken ankle and watched from an exercise bike as the sport left him behind.

“I was so focused on getting back to where I was that I didn’t have time to learn a mute grab 360,” Moles says now. “In 2005, I was finally back, but the industry had changed. I was on trips with my peers, thinking I was skiing well, but I wasn’t able to grab my skis every time I jumped. I thought, ‘Huh, I’m not getting the response I thought I would.’”

Moles did the one thing he knew he could do: he entered the U.S. Freeskiing Nationals at Snowbird and placed fourth in a field of skiers five-to-ten years younger than him. The result was strong enough to approach a few companies with a proposal that he thought was totally reasonable: five thousand dollars to cover travel for the remainder of the season. Moles was humbled to discover that was considered big money for big mountain skiers, but happy to receive some interest. Three days later, he blew out his knee and broke his femur.

“The offers evaporated. I was top five in the deepest field in big mountain freeskiing and I didn’t even get a pat on the back,” he says now. “I’ve made some money [as a pro skier], but I’m certainly not better off than when I started this whole thing … I’ve been in Utah for fifteen years. I’m one of the only World Champions who actually lives and skis here, and I can’t even get a pass from the ski areas.”

Boyd Easley dealt with similar injury-related issues. In 2002, Easley was handpicked by Armada Skis to join Tanner Hall, JP Auclair, JF Cusson, and Julien Regnier on skiing’s first “Super Team.” While Auclair, Cusson, and Regnier gave the upstart manufacturer some established legitimacy, it was Hall and Easley who represented their version of the sport’s future. It’s a future that, as Armada’s market share steadily increased over the last five years, has largely come to pass. It has done so without Easley, who suffered consecutive blown knees in 2003 and 2004.

At the beginning of the 2005/06 winter, Easley’s contracts with Armada and Oakley came up for renewal. Both sponsors had been supportive throughout his injuries, but it had been three years since Easley had contributed significantly to the sport. He knew the onus would be on him in the negotiations to prove that he still had what it takes to move the needle in a market dominated by younger skiers with bigger tricks and better knees. Easley’s head wasn’t in the snow—he knew that the tricks he used to dominate competitions three seasons ago wouldn’t even qualify him for a final anymore. The performance bar he’d helped established hadn’t simply been cleared; it had been demolished. Rather than renegotiate in bad faith, Easley retired.

“I was at the top of my game. I’d made my mark and that’s where I needed to get back to,” Easley says now. “I never got there.”

Professional freeskiers—skiers paid to represent sponsors outside the traditional racing and freestyle competition venues—have been around since K2 put together the original Performers team in the late 60s. For 30 years, the vast majority of those skiers made due with a few free pairs of skis a year and, if they were really working it, a photo-incentive deal that paid them a few hundred bucks a winter.

That all changed in the late 90s when, moving typically behind snowboarding’s curve, ski marketing took a pronounced leap in the direction of the younger consumer. Communicating to that consumer required a shift to image-driven, personality-focused marketing campaigns. Suddenly, the ski manufacturers were giving out a whole lot more free skis each year, hoping to build teams of credible athletes who spoke to younger skiers. Meanwhile, image-driven marketing coincided with more image-driven magazines and personality-focused ski movies, and suddenly the photo incentive deals became more lucrative.

The cream of this crop of new professional freeskiers eventually found themselves with contracts establishing annual retainers and something approximating a professional athletic career. This, in turn, created something of a brass ring for the less accomplished, incentive-laded photo and film sluts populating much of the magazine pages and ski movie segments. The end result is an enormous class divide in terms of who makes what.

“There’s a little club that’s making really good money,” explains Douglas, “and a really big club that’s not.”

By really good money, Douglas means something consistently north of two hundred thousand dollars a year off contracts combined between manufacturers, eyewear, clothing, and—for the lucky few—an energy drink or some other non-endemic sponsor. There are a few ways to pull this off. You could recalibrate the height-o-meter of the X Games Superpipe a few years in a row, like Simon Dumont has done. Last winter, he claimed nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in contest winnings and victory incentives, and that’s on top of his retainers with Salomon, Oakley, Red Bull, and Target. Or, you could parlay your status as the face of Swedish freeskiing into more status as the face of an international fashion and lifestyle brand, like Jon Olsson did with Stockholm’s J. Lindeberg. “I’m number two,” Dumont humbly admits when asked who he thinks is the best-paid freeskier in the world. “Jon’s number one.”

In the global freeskiing marketplace, there’s probably fewer than ten skiers in the “Maybe I’ll Pick Up This $1,500 Bar Tab To Impress My Friends” club. They are, by and large, younger new school phenoms who combine absurd photogenaity with the siren’s song of the younger consumer; think counterculture icons like Tanner Hall or France’s favorite spandex-less skier Candide Thovex. Shift into the strata of established big mountain names—the ones Moles was chasing a decade ago—and you enter slightly less rarified air.

“I would highly doubt any big mountain skiers outside Europe are making two hundred thousand a year,” says McConkey, who’s been negotiating his own contracts with varying levels of success since 1996. “Jibbing is more popular than big mountain skiing. That’s a fact. Our market has always been small enough that we don’t have agents. We fight our own battles.”

Still, McConkey stresses that he has no complaints. If guys like him or Morrison or Chris Davenport are a few notches down the income scale, they’re longevity alone is enviable. In a job where five years of peak earning power is impressive, they’ve been in the game for over ten.

“It hasn’t been easy getting the business side,” says Kreitler, who’s been pro since 1994 and recently capitalized on the trend toward old school European companies finally straggling into the freeski space. His calls his new deal with Blizzard the best of his career. “But on the other end, we enjoy a privileged status that you can’t have without being a pioneer.”

Douglas is nothing if not a pioneer. As the organizing force behind the New Canadian Air Force that all-but-invented terrain park skiing in the late 90s, he was instrumental in the creation of the ski that changed everything: the Salomon Teneighty. But on a hot spring day outside of Mammoth, California, he looks less like “The Godfather Of The Newschool” and more like a reality TV director.

Salomon’s international freestyle team has assembled at Douglas’s behest on an empty stretch of road in the high desert to shoot a clever low budget advertisement for the company’s new line of skis. It’s one more responsibility in Douglas’s absurdly complicated contract that draws from several different divisions of the company to cover his work as a skier, consultant, and independent contractor. He figures about half his income derives from “traditional” pro skier methods like his MSP segment, and the other half comes from projects like this one.

The team—Dumont, Peter Olenick, Sammy Carlson, Charles Gagnier, Mark Abma, Jen Hudak, and Kaya Turski—are nearly young enough to be his kids, and they delight in torturing him while he tries to lead a walk-through of a sequence in which Dumont catches a ski, reads off a cue card, and then tosses the ski out of the frame. Carlson’s in charge of initiating the whole thing, and his distracted attempts illicit heckles from Hudak and Turski.

“You’re getting clowned by a girl!” jeers Dumont. The peanut gallery erupts and Douglas rolls his eyes. His one-hour shoot just passed the three-hour mark and members of Salomon’s Jib Academy—an international grassroots competition program—are expecting the arrival of their heroes in the Mammoth terrain park. A few minutes later, a pickup truck rolls past. The driver rolls down her window.

“I thought something bad was happening for a minute!” she says, smiling.

“Only if you’re the director,” Douglas mutters under his breath.

Ask any representative from a ski company what the biggest misconception is amongst aspiring professional skiers, and the answers are variations on an identical theme.

“This isn’t Toyota,” says K2′s Global Brand Director, Jeff Mechura. “This isn’t Coke. We’re a relatively small industry in the grand scheme of things, but athletes sometimes view us as these huge corporations with limitless funds.”

“They seem to think that the industry has unlimited resources to be hooking people up,” agrees Rossignol’s North American Team Manager, Paddy Kay. “It’s super, super tight, especially this year with the global snow situation.”

“The money tree,” Salomon’s Sports Marketing associate Jenny Naftulin concurs, “is not the money tree.”

While no one was willing to talk in specific numbers about who makes what for this article, educated generalizations can be made: Top tier competition skiers with a stranglehold on the X Games podium and a good agent (or Ski 2.0 multi-taskers like Douglas) can probably command upwards of 200,000 a year. Established veterans with several years of competition results followed by several years of good coverage in magazines and movies are more likely in the 80,000 to 100,000 range. Everyone else, the aforementioned “big club,” are making anywhere from 50,000 to … well, to nothing. And, as Kreitler points out, they’re doing it “in towns where the plumber’s making 100 bucks an hour.”

Meanwhile, the tried-and-true methods of clawing your way up the industry ladder bear less and less fruit. Companies expect a lot more for the thousands of dollars they’re throwing their athletes’ way than they did just ten years ago, when a cover shot for a magazine like SKIING would all-but-guarantee a skier both a contract and a raise the following winter.

“Cases like that are becoming more and more rare,” says Naftulin, who is constantly approached by skiers boasting about their coverage this magazine or segment for that film company. “Even if you’re creating a segment that goes down in history and gets in front of thousands and thousands of eyes internationally, how do you tie that into Salomon’s retail components? How does it sell skis? To base a contract on a film segment, it’s too much of a risk for a big company.”

Likewise, pure competition results (outside of massive X Games exposure) no longer cut it. Drew Tabke won the 2007 U.S. Freeskiing Nationals and took second on the IFSA World Tour, and he doesn’t even get travel budget from his sponsors. “The only money I make skiing is money I win,” he says. And with the largest first-place prize purse on tour being 3,000 dollars, Tabke’s down months are filled with standard ski bum jobs like valet parking and dish washing.

“It’s a short life, I don’t care who you are,” says Easley. “You’re going to wear out sooner than later because your body can only take so much. So, you make it for five or six years, and it’s a good life. But what are you going to do afterwards?”

Easley is a sales rep for an oxygen company. Moles coaches, judges big mountain contests, paints houses, and tends bar. Even Kreitler sees the off-white light at the end of the tunnel—he conducted his interview for this article in between final exams for his real estate license.

Of course, talking about professional strictly in terms of dollars and cents sort of misses the light fluffy powder of the point. “I’m having more fun than anybody,” says Dumont. “I travel around to contests, party with my best friends, ski, and make a good living off it. It’s the best job you can ask for.”

Then again, that’s easy for him to say. He’s probably qualified for Bush’s tax cuts at this point.

For Easley, retirement has brought (at least partially) a welcome respite from the grind of keeping up in a sport that seems to grow younger by the month. “When it comes down to it, the skiing part of it is totally different,” he admits. “You’re constantly working at learning new tricks, and you have your awesome days where you learn something new or you win a contest. But you have those days where you nervous, you’re wrecking all the time trying to learn something. It used to be about skipping training to hit the park or ski powder with your buddies.” Some of Easley’s best days on snow have come in the past two seasons, long after he cashed his last paycheck from Armada.

Ultimately, it’s Tabke—the one skier interviewed who hasn’t even sniffed a living from skiing—who puts the whole thing into the most realistic perspective. “I think it’s funny when I hear people saying we deserve to be paid more,” he says about a gripe that’s practically the mission statement of many big mountain skiers. “We’re partying and skiing. What do you want to be paid for? It’s not like I wouldn’t welcome a hundred thousand a year just to ski, but it’s not my goal. If the industry and I cross paths and opportunities present themselves, I’ll take them. But I’m happy doing my own thing.”

Then again, that’s easy for him to say. He doesn’t have a wife, two kids, and a mortgage to cover.

A day after the commercial shoot, Douglas stands beneath the final jump in the Mammoth terrain park—a 30-foot money booter in full view of the lodge deck and the lift line. Mullin is up above, shooting the in run as Nick Geopper, a thirteen-year-old grommet from Indiana, rockets toward take off. Geopper graduated to the Jib Academy from his local qualifier at Ohio’s Snowtrails Resort, where he displayed more potential and enthusiasm than 52 other kids.
For nearly a week, he’ll almost nothing but lap the park alongside skiers he’s only seen in movies and magazines, like Olenick and Carlson. It’s a perfect spring day, with afternoon sun turning the snow into forgiving corn. Even Dumont, who can’t ski due to a tweaked knee, has made his way up to cheer Nick and the rest of the Academy members on.

It’s not that big a jump, but Nick’s not that big a kid, and his soaring backflip elicits a few ooh’s and aah’s from the crowd. Douglas shakes his head. “It took me until I was 24 to land a backflip,” he says.

Ask Nick if he knows who Douglas is, and he’ll swear that he does. Ask him why he spent the first three days of the Jib Academy referring to him as “Adam” and he’ll begrudgingly admit that, okay, maybe he wasn’t that sure at first. After all, Nick was four years old when Douglas delivered the Teneighty to the racks of his local ski shop.

But ask Nick what he wants to be when he grows up, and he’ll look at you like you just asked the single stupidest question he’s ever heard. “A pro skier,” he replies.

Doesn’t everybody?