Just the other day I was sitting on a bar stool next to Mr. Chris Casula discussing the state of competitive skiing. It’s a pretty popular topic of conversation these days as it seems likely that ski superpipe will make it into The Games if the Mayan calendar doesn’t get us first. The particular topic of debate wasn’t Mount Olympus, per se; it was whether or not we saw a new class of skier emerge at the 2010 X-Games and subsequent Dew stops.

I broke the field into two groups: trainers and regular skiers who just happen to be athletically gifted. It seems to me that Bobby Brown’s victories exemplify the emergence of the “trained” skier. Tom Wallisch, on the other hand, was the last remnant of the amazingly gifted kid who loves to ski and can also win comps from time to time. I don’t know either person, so I have absolutely no idea if this is accurate, but the way I imagine it Bobby goes to the gym everyday and does 1000 reps of every spin he’s capable of on a trampoline. He then goes to Breck and lays down flawless slope run after flawless slope run. These images get blended with Ivan Drago’s training sequence from Rocky IV, and you get the picture.

Once again, with no evidence to support it, I imagine Tom’s day looks a lot more like any of us. He wakes up, teaches Henrik a new English word to pronounce funny, and then heads to the hill. There are probably days when he drills a new trick, but there are others that he doesn’t do a single spin you’d ever see in a competition.

My point to Chris was that this season we saw the flawless repetition of Bobby’s tricks win over Tom’s more fluid and less-drilled run. In other words- Tom may even be a better skier, but the guy who trains his run mechanically will be able to reproduce it at will without mistakes. Chris likened it to a short-routine in gymnastics or ice dancing. It becomes a rehearsed program that takes advantage of muscle memory and all that sports science stuff to be perfectly consistent.

Chris disagreed, and went with another sports metaphor: Tom is like a batter who is in a slump. All the greats go through slumps, and Tom will snap out of his.

I really have no idea, and I’m not overly concerned because competition doesn’t matter much. It’s a nice visible product, but it ain’t the soul of the thing.