Watching the freeride and freestyle skiing competitions at the recent Olympics reminded me of a time, 35 years ago, when "freeride" didn't yet exist and the "freestyle" community was lusting after Olympic credibility. I was at the freestyle world championships in 1991, when freestylers were actively petitioning the International Olympic Committee to have their sport join the Olympic family.
Most of the freestylers were enthusiastic about the idea of entering the Olympic arena. Olympic acceptance would mean a stamp of legitimacy, which was granted in 1992 when freestyle officially became a part of the Olympic program. But while the freestyle majority grasped eagerly for the Olympic ring, a small minority were convinced that Olympic inclusion could precipitate freestyle's demise – that the sport would become deflated and deadened by Olympic certification.
Those in the minority harkened back to freestyle's early days as hot dogging, filled with free-spirited, crowd-pleasing, counterculture hyper-expressionism. Hotdogging events, perhaps fueled by potent potables and incendiary intoxicants, were raging good fun that flew in the face of prim Olympic earnestness. They were marked by music, snowball fights, and innumerable and highly entertaining face plants and course deviations. The events were often rousingly loosey-goosey. For the sport to become Olympic, it had to become better behaved, and the protesting minority worried that that would rob freestyle of its hot-dogging exuberance. It would stop being fun.
The minority was mostly right.
This is not to say that what the freestylers and freeriders were doing at the last month's Olympics lacked imagination or great athletic skill. But not only was hot dogging's free spirit absent, what was happening wasn't really even skiing. The performances were something more like aeronautic gymnastics. It was at times a bit formulaic, with the athletes (in the freestyle aerials, slopestyle, big air, and halfpipe events) doing more or less the same things, give or take a twist or a rotation, with cryptically calculated numerical scores lending an air of Olympic authority. Anyone – like most skiers – who believes that the foundational essence of skiing is in the beauty of linking turns together, might have been perplexed by an absence of turns. The non-turning mandate: ski straight at a kicker and launch. Even the "turns" in the mogul competition consisted of the rapid-fire and repetitive jabbing of skis left and right. The skidded turn is a valid skiing technique, to be sure. But dynamically carved turns? Forget about it.
The terrain on which the athletes performed was entirely artificial. The snow structures that groomers and snowmakers created – the giant ramps, berms, halfpipes, rails, and so on – were fantastically imposing. There was an artfully logarithmic precision in every jump's launch angle. Even the mogul field was an artificial creation, a uniformly groomed minefield of egg-carton repetitiveness. But these artificial venues were so divorced from mountain reality that they could have been –and have been – reinvented in environments (like Fenway Park in Boston) that have nothing to do with mountains or skiing.
Oddly, both Olympic freestyle and freeride seek, whimsically if symbolically, to clutch to their sports' free-spirited roots. Athletes are required (in most events) to use poles, even if poles might actually be cumbersome in the execution of the airborne acrobatics that comprise their routines. But because real skiers in real mountain environments use poles, a link between Olympic artificiality and mountain reality is belabored and maintained.
Same goes for clothing, where in most cases freestyle and freeride athletes are expected/required to wear the kind of loose-fitting clothing that real-mountain skiers wear. Baggy clothing is also probably an inhibitor in the execution of freeride/freestyle tricks, but it preserves the pretense of being directly connected to real-mountain skiing. This clothing commandment was once glaringly ridiculous in skicross, the raciest form of freeride, where four to six athletes go head-to-head on a course of man-made berms and whoop-de-dos. Skicrossers were originally required to wear clothing that had to pass what was called the "pinch test." Their outfits had to be loose enough so that a healthy amount of material could be grasped between thumb and forefinger when pinched. This idiocy was finally dropped; now skicrossers wear aerodynamic, skintight suits just like their alpine-racing counterparts.
Is this just the spoil-sport gripe of a curmudgeon fond of the good old days and resistant to progress, or do Olympic freestyle and freeride need to reconnect with skiing reality?
It's possible that the answer is both. Again, Olympic freestylers and freeriders are doing some athletically amazing stuff, and that should be celebrated. But there is room for real-mountain skiing, too.
For starters, the egg-carton mogul slopes should be scrapped. A skier's ability to link different-radius turns through an uneven, skier-created mogul field should be tested. Great mogul skiers are primarily slitherers rather than jabbers, snaking through a complex succession of bumps and trenches, with unexpected jolts forcing unexpected course corrections.
There is no reason that one of the three freeride events – big air, slopestyle, and halfpipe – can't be ditched in favor of a true freeride challenge. (Those three events reward, more or less, the same acrobatic skill set.) In northern Italy, for example, where the recent Olympics were held, there is surely some appropriate face or couloir where athletes on very challenging natural terrain could have showed off their big-mountain talents and creativity.
In the next Olympics in the French Alps in 2030, how nice it would be to see a semblance of real skiing return to the freestyle and freeride events.
Oliver lives in Warren.
