Just before last season I wrote an article in response to the dropping of an outerwear company that I judged to be somewhat uninspired. The gist of the thing was that the terms “rider influenced” or “inspired by riders” are excellent for your street cred, but really shitty if you’re looking to make something unique. You see, that particular company seems to have gotten input from riders who wanted nothing more than a Saga suit with a Siver front pocket. Nobody stopped to ask why “the riders” didn’t just buy a Saga kit or go shopping for Siver on Getboards.

I’m revisiting this theme because I just got done reading about a new company that is “bringing something different to the table” by being, you guessed it, “rider driven.” The impressive thing is that “the riders” are so predictable. Every time anybody asks them for input we end up with taller-than-normal length, bright neon colorways, and asymmetrical block designs.

New ad systems and forum topic integration are sure to bring out every would-be entrepreneur with a trust fund and some friends that can ski good. In spirit, it’s a good thing for all of us. I’m Amurican enough to believe that choice and competition are beneficial, and as the founder of a short-lived clothing company in my teenage years, I think it builds character. But I think I was too subtle in my last article, so this time I’ll be more direct: Let the skiers handle the skiing, and since you’ve taken it upon yourself to start a company, you handle the design. There’s a ton of places to find inspiration, but you’re probably lazy enough to name the company after your street address, so I’ll take the liberty of providing some sources (all photos used without permission, please don’t sue us).

Music

Movies

Random retro crap:

Just by writing this I run the real risk of giving you the impression that any of this matters. It doesn’t. However, the situation with Team America releasing their edit too early, Jon writing a strongly worded letter, and then Tom and Simon’s agents writing a pretty silly response for them has really helped me understand what is so annoying about our sport’s primadonnas.

Initially I had thought it was just their jockish nature. But that always came up a bit hollow. I have plenty of friends that suffer from the affliction of jockism, and while they might be too eager to talk about stats, standings, and deadlifts, they tend to be pretty good guys. The difference is in the sport. Not only does Simon Dumont make a living at a discipline that is more like gymnastics than football, but he does it entirely alone; that’s where the trouble lies. Now there are plenty of sports where you compete alone, but they tend to have some sort of partner system. Take boxing for example, you don’t have a team in that ring, but during training you’ve got sparring partners and coaches to drill with. There’s a socialization process.

Simon and Tom didn’t win, so they took their ball (the edit) and went home (Youtube). In the letter they explain that the criteria for judging the edits were changed without their knowledge. I guess that’s a legitimate gripe, but boys- this ain’t the Olympics. It’s fucking JOSS! The guy named the event after himself. If he wants to make a rule that says, “Simon Dumont will have one point deducted for every inch that he is shorter than me,” he damn well can. That’s the whole reason egomaniacs like Jon name events after themselves.

For a final sports simile: JOSS is like the MLB All-Star game. If Roy Halladay decided to walk off the field with two outs in the inning because the umpire’s strike zone was too small, we’d all agree that he was being douchey. Well Tom and Simon, you’re being douchey. This is an invitation event, you can just say no next year. I hear the Orage Masters is more fun anyway.

1. Big clothing

2. Rap music

3. Simon Dumont

But that being said, I have a nifty login here at BroBomb and damn it, I’m using it. Enjoy the 2010 Team America JOSS Edit. God knows Jon won’t.

-Rogge

It’s been a long season of competitions, and let me tell you—ignoring them all is really hard work. We can all sing a happy song now that the Dumont Cup is over, and that ego-fest out in Sweden will be wrapping up in the next couple months. I’ll keep praying that those two budgets get rolled into one massive Jon/Simon strokefest DVD, making them easier to ignore, but in the meantime we can all bask in the pink glory that is the Orage Masters.

Skiing’s only no-trampoline-required competition is almost upon us. It’s a sad state of affairs that we only have one anti-comp style event, but for this weekend it beats the shit out of pretending to care about who is lipsliding Jon’s cannon box. This is the sentence where I’d like to say that I’m hopping on a plane for Whistler tomorrow and I’ll be live streaming the event using some technology I don’t know about. However, until the iPad reinvents the internet and makes me a millionaire, the BroBomb travel budget is tapped for this winter. I hear user-generated content is the new thing, so feel free to film the event for us. We’d love that.

For the uninitiated, this thing goes down in a team format and the following will be represented: Amplid, Armada, Line, Volkl, K2, Surface, and Salomon. Each team has provided some hints towards their themes, and Twitter tells me that Surface will be rocking it Dead Head style. For those still unsure what to do for a theme, let me help:

The topical theme always wins at Halloween parties, and the Masters is no different. So what you do is go with the all-too-obvious Tiger Woods theme. You’ll need one fuzzy tiger outfit, one angry-blonde wife with a golf club, and a gaggle of backup bimbos. It’s cheap, easy, and even Canadians are likely to get it.

Telluride Tuesdays with Garrett usually runs in this spot, so we’ll end it with a quote from our favorite person who is banned from Canada:

“I don’t really have the connections, but Pat Bridges hooks me up and I can go ride any snowboard superpark, but yet I don’t get invited to any ski shit, you know? I don’t get it. I would love to see what would happen if I got invited to something like the Orage Masters. I think Jay (Levinthal) and those guys are like, ‘No, no Garret you don’t compete, we don’t want you to.’ But on the inside I’m like, ‘I want to show what I can do.’”

So Canada, stop being so lame and let bygones be bygones. LINE, you need to find a way to get Garrett to the Masters, skiing needs this.

Fast forward to 2010 and you’ve just strapped on your fancy new helmet cam. You rip it down a pow-covered slope, or take a truly epic lap in your home park. You think to yourself, “Damn I’m cool, I’m going to go home and put this on Youtube.” Guess who cares? You and nobody else. That shit is boring and nobody wants to see it. I don’t care if you’re a kid in the Midwest or a pow bro shooting with Nimbus; the front of your skis and a shaky ass view of snow flying by is coma-inducing dull.

POV for the water ramps.

The GoPro is obviously really cool; it’s an affordable HD camera with a fisheye. I love that you don’t have to have ultra-rich parents to be able to make a decent edit anymore. But either attach that shit to a pole and have your friend film you, or just keep the footage for your own enjoyment. I’m sure you’re thinking about how your idea is different. People are going to love the angle you’ve set up by attaching it to your knee or some other ridiculous thing, but we won’t. It will be boring. Please believe me.
Trends come and trends go, let’s hope the POV self-filming B.S. will be a silly trend that we look back on and laugh about.

Or maybe we're in for 100 more self-indulgent products.

Mike sent me this email yesterday. He’d probably prefer that I exclude the initial note, but that’s just too bad.

“So I’m sitting in an airport and I had a few thoughts I’d like you to post on Brobomb. Feel free to post them under my name. No aliases on the Bomb. That shit is for pussies. Anyway, here goes:

European X Games is never going to work and here are three reasons why:

1. Sure, it’s great for the twelve up-and-coming Euro skiers to compete in the “X Games” but a majority of European skiers will always be racers. ESPN wants ratings and when it comes to Europeans, we all know they could give less than half a shit about a bunch of no name North Americans that make less than $100,000 and throw down in a U-shaped stunt ditch. Unless, that is, their homeland heroes win Gold and Silver to beat those no name North Americans. Viva le Bertoni! Viva le Rolland!

2. Americans are the primary consumers of the Winter X Games and anything remotely European, let alone French, is just bullshit to us. It’s not right, but it’s the truth. Baguettes are bullshit when you have the option of snappin’ into a Slim Jim in Colorado.

3. European X Games can be viewed metaphorically through another European edition of a popular American franchise. That franchise is, of course, the National Lampoon’s movies. In the hilarious original, Family Vacation (metaphor cheat sheet: This is Winter X Games – America) we have Chevy Chase (the athletes) at his comedic peak and making an enormous splash with fans by way of groundbreaking family humor (new and exciting tricks in pipe and big air) on the silver screen (ESPN is a big deal). Everybody loves it. A smash hit! Chevy could have walked away, but he decides to cash in and star in another funny Lampoon’s flick- Christmas Vacation (let’s call this the Winter Dew Tour). Christmas Vacation proves to be equally successful and the fans love Chevy more for making another great flick and he gets a boatload of money to boot. Again, Chevy could have walked away, this time with two incredible films under his belt. Unfortunately, the creators (ESPN) of the first film (still Winter X Games – America) aren’t satisfied with just one awesome Chevy Chase vacation film. They need a third– enter European Vacation (X Games Europe), quite possibly the worst ever Chevy Chase performance. You can tell that he (remember Chevy = the athletes) is only in it for the paycheck (I can never blame the athletes for wanting to grab some extra dough) and his heart is nowhere to be found. It’s his worst film of all time, and it left a blemish on a career that’s now reduced to commercials and second-rate TV shows. If anything positive can be said about European Vacation, it’d have to be the European extras (12 up-and-coming Euros) who gave an incredible performance on their home turf.

In closing, Viva le Winter X Games: Aspen.”

Mike Rogge writes positive articles for SkiTheEast, hosts The Ski Show (Tuesdays 9-11pm) on wbkm.org, and loves trashing BroBomb to Jon Hartley.

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.

I ventured over to this Wordpress back end as opposed to my own, because while my hate mongering towards skiers is mostly for show, I felt the video submission YoBeat received recently and the attached story may better be suited for the BroBOMB readership. Allow me to introduce Jeremiah Paquette, aka Jermagain.

Hopefully you enjoyed that little vid, as Jeremiah made it to prove a point: Snowboarding is easy, but skiing is easier. Apparently this was his first day shredding on two planks this season. But don’t worry, that’s not the good part of the story, or the reason I posted it. No, the real reason Jeremiah made this video is out of pure spite! You see, as Jermagain, he is a frequent commenter on REELcomp, a sort of extreme Youtube where kids post their videos and make fun of each other. Apparently, the kids trying to show off their skills don’t appreciate Jermagain’s subtle brand of hate-filled humor though, and he recently received this letter:

Hey Jermagain,

This is Reelcomp. I have been monitoring the comments being posted. I have noticed that you have been posting alot (sic) of “hater” comments. This has to stop. Snowboarding and skateboarding are progressive sports. This site is trying to progress the sport. People who receive these type of comments are taking it offensively. I understand if you are joking around, but a lot of users don’t see it that way. Plus they have all asked for you to post a video. We have yet to see any from you. Maybe you can show your skills… I’m sure plenty of users would like to see.

So this is a warning… We like it when people post stuff that is negative but has a point to it… We don’t appreciate people trying to bag all the time. So can you please stop.

REELcomp–

So this video is Jerm “showing his skills.” Since you, the BroBOMB reader are clearly more sophisticated when it comes to skiing standards than us hacks over at YoBeat, I figured you may have some insight to offer. Does this kid have the ski-cred to hate on whatever he pleases or should he hang it up and find a new hobby?

About three weeks ago I was in Burlington, VT with Mike Rogge. I was going on the Ski Show that night, and the timing couldn’t have been better. I was sitting on the couch, checking out the latest edits, and I came upon Tanner’s now-deleted rant at the Linecatcher event. I heard Rogge coming down the stairs, so for dramatic effect I held up my laptop and said, “check this shit out” as I pushed play.

Those of you tuned into the Ski Show that night already know that Rogge drinks a special brand of Kool-Aid that renders him blind to all of Tanner’s miscues. You also know that I’ve been known to sip the Haterade a bit myself. Mike and I went skiing at Smuggler’s Notch the next day, and spent a great portion of those long lift rides discussing/debating the issue.

Tanner makes for good conversation—his mannerisms, outbursts, accent, and ever changing self-identity are like a case study in being famous too young. At some point in the conversation I used Mike Tyson as a comparison. Little did I know, the comparison would only get more compelling.

The trailer for Eric Iberg’s new Tanner-based documentary, “Like A Lion,” dropped yesterday. This is the point where you expect me to shit on the cheesy monologue about skiing as a “means of survival,” but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you figured that part out on your own. I actually think this project has a ton of potential, if it takes some cues from Iron Mike’s recent documentary- “Tyson.”

Tanner isn’t as famous as Mike Tyson, and he hasn’t come close to the career implosion that befell him either. That’s just the point though; that documentary was honest about Mike’s mistakes, and thus it restored the humanity of a man commonly portrayed as a monster. If “Like a Lion” can be unpretentious and honest about Tanner’s amazing achievements and at-times bizarre behavior, then all the petty hate will be put to rest. It’s a lot less fun to point out that somebody’s crazy if that person just said on film, “You know what? Sometimes I’m a bit crazy.”

Is that the type of movie we’re likely to see? Hopefully, but probably not. It’s unlikely for one reason: Eric Iberg is Tanner’s close friend. It’s really hard not to protect your friend, and this movie will suck if it’s just a bro-fest of Tanner accolades. I’m hoping we see a human, not a bizarre Rasta-robot, but the tag line “the true story of legendary skier Tanner Hall” might have already tipped their hand.

I’ve heard some uproar over this alleged boot. It seems that fashion tongues are usually associated with rollerblade boots, and we all know how horrible it would be if skiing were equated with its forward-facing bastard cousin. I’m usually more than willing to jump in on a hatefest, but this time ol’ Jonny is going to assuage your fears. You don’t have to worry kids; snowboarders did it too. Behold, the Danny Kass fashion tongue pro model:

Photo stolen from Yobeat.com

I bet you’re relieved. Don’t thank me, this is what I’m here for. You can buy yourself the same (alleged) boots as Mr. Wallisch and not once worry about whether or not that backside grind you’re calling a lipslide looks like a rollerblade trick. Then again, if ideas must be bit, couldn’t we give something like this a try?