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.

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