FREEZE
Issue: October, 2004
Assignment: Controversial feature story examining the increasing roll of ski academies in the world of freeskiing.
DEK: Now that ski academies are piling on will the freeskiing bandwagon break?
The 1991 World Extreme Skiing Championships in Alaska—arguably the birth of freeskiing—was a celebration of individuality. A bunch of adrenaline-addicted yahoos from across the globe, each with their own claims to ultimate badass-itude, descended upon Valdez and shelled out some hundred-dollar bills to be flown to the top of a big-ass peak and ski down it in the gnarliest way possible. A bunch of like-minded yahoos watched carefully and at the end of the event decided that Doug Coombs was the extreme-ist. Everyone returned to their corner of the globe, and the seeds for a very different kind of skiing were planted.
It’s a long way from Valdez to the halfpipe on Blackcomb, where the 2004 World Ski Invitational Pipe Jam is underway. Mike Gutt, the marketing director for K2’s freeride program, watches from the bottom as another young rubber man drops in. Gutt tries calling the trick before each hit, getting it right most of the way. “And now a flat 5,” Gutt says as the competitor floats a lofty one, “to the 7.” The skier sticks a perfect 7. “They always finish with the 7,” he says with a grin.
The skier is Matt Phillipi, a student at Carrabasset Valley Academy (CVA) at Sugarloaf, Maine. CVA is best known as the academy that produced current World Cup Champion Bode Miller, one of the best ski racers in U.S. Ski Team history. But Phillipi, along with his friends Dan Marion, Silas Miller, and Corey Vanular, are starting to make noise as part of a program at CVA that’s only four seasons old—a freeskiing program.
The first academies date back to the early 70s and were born out of a desire to produce ski racers who could compete at the Olympic level. By the end of the 80s, academies could be found from northern New England to the Pacific Northwest. As freestyle skiing sold its soul to the International Federation of Skiing (FIS) and exchanged a loosely organized, fun-first format for consideration as an Olympic event, freestyle programs began springing up at some academies. By the mid 90s, academy racers and freestylers dominated podiums from regional junior events on up to national championships, and it was rare for a kid to emerge from a local program to reach the top of his or her discipline.
At the same time, a bunch of academy refugees—race kids who never quite breached the top echelons of that discipline—were busy bringing skiing styled after the World Extreme Skiing Championships to resorts throughout the West. Skiers like Shane McConkey (Burke Mountain Academy, 1988), Chris Davenport (Holderness School, 1989), and Brant Moles (Green Mountain Valley Academy, 1989) completely redefined how to look at a mountain—particularly the steep, cliffed-out, scary parts of the mountain that all but the best generally avoided. They were constantly challenging each other to find gnarlier lines with bigger airs through faces like Squaw Valley’s KT-22 or Crested Butte’s Spellbound Bowl.
“We were trying to get away from the organized versions of skiing that we grew up with at the academies,” says McConkey. “We were doing it because it was something that was totally different and creative and had so much potential.” They even coined the term “freeskiing” to describe what they were doing to an industry that was baffled by their big-mountain, big-air antics.
Freeskiing was so successful in breaking away from the establishment that by the time McConkey and the others gained recognition from the industry and the masses for their talents, a whole new crop of skiers took the same knack for looking at the mountain differently into terrain parks and halfpipes. The style of skiing that emerged was as alien to the masses as big-mountain skiing was, and all of it was considered—sometimes dismissively —“freeskiing.” With wunderkinds like Tanner Hall representing the same corner of the sport as McConkey, freeskiing was simply too diverse to be digested by FIS or any other organizing body—including McConkey’s own International Free Skiing Association, which he helped start in 1996. “When something blows up real fast like freeskiing did,” McConkey says now, “it’s hard to have an organization that contains it all. Especially when it shouldn’t be contained in the first place.
And then came the 2000 Winter X Games. Boyd Easley—then a haphazard member of CVA’s freestyle team—earned a berth to the Games when he entered a big-air comp on a whim while training in Europe and won. Well-accustomed to the East Coast ice of Mt. Snow, where the games were held that year, Boyd stunned the world by taking fourth in big air. A star was born, but so was an idea.
“That was my first exposure to that sort of thing,” says CVA Headmaster John Ritzo. “Even at an event like the [Freestyle] Nationals, there was nothing like the crowds they had at the X Games. There was so much excitement—it was pretty clear where the sport was heading.” CVA, which was the first academy to create a snowboarding program in the late 80s, introduced the first ski academy freeskiing program that next school year.
Since then, whatever wall had been thrown up between freeskiing and organized elements in the sport has come crashing down—FIS is sanctioning World Cup halfpipe events, and there is talk of an Olympic event in 2010. Freeskiing programs are now in place at academies throughout the country, and the CVA kids are leading a charge toward competition podiums—Marion and Miller took first and third, respectively, at last winter’s X Games Qualifier, and Phillipi won the East Coast Open quarterpipe and took second in the pipe the next day.
Back at Blackcomb, Gutt shakes his head as Silas Miller follows Phillipi’s run with one that is nearly identical. “This is my point about the academies,” he explains. “These boys have a huge bag of tricks and are super-talented, but it seems like they learn a stunt, check it off their list, and move on without taking the time to refine it or inspire a variation that makes it entirely their own. When you watch the best freeskiers in the sport come down the mountain, there’s no mistaking a Pep Fujas or a Mark Abma. I’m not sure the academy programs are able to foster that sort of individual style.”
Individual style is the antithesis of today’s mogul competitor, whose knees—let alone his tricks—are refined to the slightest movement, in an effort to mimic the current world champion. Yet a number of the academy freeskiing programs, including CVA and Waterville Valley Academy in New Hampshire, are lumped under the banner of the freestyle program. If freeskiing was created in part to keep at least some of skiing out of the hands of organizations like FIS that demand uniformity and strict judging guidelines, don’t these programs run a real risk of delivering pipe and slopestyle skiing to the organizations that have—let’s face it—strangled freestyle into something far closer to figure skating or gymnastics than actual skiing?
“We try to get our kids to ski for themselves,” says CVA’s Head Freeskiing Coach Nate McKenzie. He points out that differences between the freeskiing program and the freestyle or Alpine racing programs include a training regime less focused on aerobic fitness and more focused on body strength and air mechanics. His athletes are as likely to be working on a trampoline or in a skatepark at the academy’s “Anti-Gravity” training center as they are to be in a gym. “If one of my competitors doesn’t think his favorite trick is going to win, that’s not a reason to not throw it,” McKenzie explains. “We coach on how their skiing feels and not how it looks to a judge. Skiing is about achieving the ultimate feeling, not about being told what your score is by a judge.”
That’s enlightened thinking from a coach, considering that his job is to train athletes who win. But CVA isn’t exactly redefining skiing the way McConkey and his peers did. Every student in their freeskiing program is expected to compete every weekend of the winter, with the goal of qualifying for a series championship of some kind. The program is competition-based, making it not so different from the freestyle program after all. When asked what his goals for his skiing are, the seventeen-year-old Marion replies, “CVA is really competitive, so most of your goals are based around your competition results and your performance at those competitions.”
Freeskiing may have begun as a rebellion against established elements in the sport, but that rebellion ended when the first mom clicked into a pair of twin-tips. There will always be gnarly local rippers who tear the backcountry to pieces and boosting halfpipe mutants who make SportsCenter highlight reels, but the ticket-buying general public no longer identifies it as “freeskiing.” From McConkey to Marion, it is skiing.
“Now that it’s officially the next big thing,” McConkey says, “the academies are embracing it. It’s their job to help young people become world-class skiers.” When asked if he wonders whether the academies threaten the spirit of a sport he helped reinvent, McConkey is thoughtful: “It’s tough to rip on a program that’s helping skiers be better at what they’re doing.”
It’s important to note that the ski industry finally paid attention to McConkey and his friends when it realized that its younger customers were leaving skiing in droves for snowboarding. Now that freeskiing has returned on its promise and kids like Marion are bringing a renewed passion to the sport, there’s another fact to consider when talking about the academy programs and what they mean for the sport: kids are bound by law to go to school.
“The key is time on snow,” says Marion. “CVA lets you have the best of both worlds: it looks good on a college résumé, and I get so much time on snow, which makes you a much better skier. CVA lets me get that time on snow while keeping my parents happy.”
