Hackel, left, sampling the setup, and giving the Scottish phenom a lift. Photos: Peak Performance
On September 27, Professional freeskier and two-time X Games medalist Alex Hackel had just arrived in London, alongside Anne Karava, Henrik Windstead, and Hedvig Wessel. This wasn’t just a break from life in America to ride the London Eye. Despite the lack of mountains and snow, Hackel was there to ski.
September 27 marks the day when the ski apparel brand Peak Performance opened its first UK store in London. The brand, which skiers may recognize for sponsoring the Freeride World Tour, decided to host an urban rail jam as its foray into entering England’s small, but apparently dedicated, ski community. This event allowed Hackel an eye into an underrated, and rarely explored, subculture: snow-less, urban skiing.
Now, it is true that the ski event was a marketing stunt, but it was also historic. The urban jibbing event, which, in addition to the UK Jibworx team, was attended by pro skiers from around the globe and was the first of its kind in over two decades. This event in 2024 was designed to pay homage to 1995’s Covent Garden Big Air event, an unlikely snowboarding competition that went down in the piazza and is now regarded as the arrival of freeride snowsports in the UK.
“Peak Performance told us they were launching a store in the UK, and they were going to do an event,” Hackel explained. “Then, I learned that they had a big air event there in 1995, a year before I was born. So I figured out, in the process of arriving there, that this was historic.”
“I had no idea what Covenant Garden was,” Hackel admitted. “I mean, I knew of it, but I didn’t realize how central it was in London and that it was such a big shopping center. It was like skiing in Newbury Street in Boston, so it was really cool.”
Hackel said the set-up consisted of a “drop in… from a bus, and the rails were on top of the bus. These college guys bought it; they do parties and events and go around with a whole crew that does ski shows from the bus. You could go in the bus if you wanted to, and you could even hang out in it. There were a bunch of freeskiers from the UK.”
“UK freeskiers are such a special breed of people,” Hackel said. “They’re super overlooked because they have no mountains there, so there’s really no reason for many people to go there if they want to go skiing. But there are so many people from the UK that love to ski and it’s such a big part of their lifestyle and identity, so it’s really cool to be there because you just meet all these super nice people who love skiing, who don’t usually have events coming there and are super intrigued.”
The event wasn’t just intended to draw attention to the storefront: it was also designed to expose more people to skiing. “Some kid might have just been walking with his parents who had no idea that event was happening and saw somebody do a cool ski trick that day, and then all of a sudden thinks that skiing is super cool and wants to go to the indoor slope,” Hackel said. “Maybe his his parents could take him on a ski trip twice a year, but he’s kind of been dragging his feet. And this time, he wants to figure out how to slide a rail. I think we made a very positive impression on a whole group of up-and-coming young, UK skiers.”
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Although the UK is relatively off-the-map in terms of ski talent and is certainly not on any top 10 lists for ski destinations, “there is actually a good bit of culture from the UK,” Hackel said. “The most famous skier is probably James Woods (or Woodsy)” Besides being a gold medalist in the X Games and a three-time Olympian, Woods was one of the founding members of Jib League, an alternative freeski competition that takes place in Europe.
“Then, there’s a bunch of up-and-coming UK skiers right now,” Hackel said. “Tom Greenway,” a 21-year-old freeskier from Tamworth, England, and “Chris McCormick, a freeskier from Glasglow, for starters.” Hackel also pointed to the ski publication Newschoolers, which is based in Canada but “has a bunch of British people who work there, like Twigsy.”
Hackel, who resides in Boston and can commiserate with poor skiing conditions, said, “I think of the UK as somehow just being an even worse place for skiers than the East Coast. We actually have mountains to go skiing, and they have some mountains in Scotland. But, unlike them, we have a full season. We ski from November to April. They don’t even have a ski season. They just have indoor slopes. We visited indoor slopes the day before the event. So potentially, they have a year-round ski season, but they have virtually no natural resources to go skiing.”
Hackel explained that most UK skiers begin skiing on a slope or a dome, and then go straight to the park. “That’s very similar to the East Coast as well. You ski a bunch of groomers, then you get tired of skiing the same groomers, so you go into the park, and then that’s where you start to get more joy and then you start traveling,” Hackel said. “Then, you start getting these bigger mountains, and then you start seeing that there’s powder and there’s other things. It’s a natural progression.”
Essentially, the UK has a ski scene thanks to its indoor resources. “There are kids who are 13 to 18 who go skiing twice a week, all year round, and are super good skiers. They can do really good tricks. But all of their ski scene is artificial. It’s super common for people in the UK to go to the Alps for two weeks,” Hackel said. Still, due to his observations, “British people love skiing.”
For example, “there was this one kid named Deja. He was a 14-year-old kid from Scotland, and they have a local group. They’d bring out this setup from the bus. Peak Performance had non-Peak sponsored athletes do demos, and they made us play a skiing version of a game of s-k-a-t-e. In front of the crowd, I ended up playing him in the finals. I totally thought this 14-year-old kid from Scotland was going to beat me because he was skiing so good.”
“In the end, I ended up winning, because I got the trick he didn’t,” Hackel laughed. “And then he goes up again to do the trick. He lands it, and then we put him up on our shoulders and cheer him.”
“The whole crowd cheers him on because he’s a freaking 14-year-old hero in Scotland,” Hackel said. “He shouldn’t be a super good skier, and he was crushing it all day. At the end of the event we were holding him up in front of the crowd and everyone was cheering. It was just super wholesome, and that’s a representation of the ski culture there.”
