Photo: Dew Tour
Each December, millions of surf fans either make the pilgrimage to the famed North Shore of Oahu, or to their local WIFI hot spot, to watch the world’s best surfers battle it out in a death-defying duel of beauty and savagery.
The Billabong Pipe Masters is the last stop on the World Surf league’s Championship Tour. And every year it seems that the drama surrounding the event grows, creating more interest in the sport. Will it be another Brazilian wunderkind, a 43-year-old trying to clinch a 12th World Title, or maybe a blonde Australian who throws man turns like a boss and fights sharks?
And Pipeline, the all-mighty Holy Grail of surfing, where men are made and surfers are sent home with stitches and cracked bones. She is powerful, elegant, and down-right terrifying. Every year surf fans say prayers and hold vigils, hoping that the surf gods will send double overhead waves so the world’s best can risk it all for a shot at glory.
While the surf world is celebrating a new World Champion, snow is falling in the mountains. Snowboarders are rejoicing in the beginning of another season, waxing bases, checking binding straps, and this year, relishing the early blessings of a strong El Nino.
And while the winter is off to a triumphant start this year, at least for those on the West Coast, from this pundit’s point of view, there’s almost zero buzz surrounding snowboard competition, at least from the core snowboard community. Sure there’ll be X-Games and the US Open, and of course the Dew Tour and even the usual movie releases, but there’s nothing even slightly comparable in magnitude or prestige to the World Surf League’s hype that often reaches Good Morning America proportions.
Some might claim that the Olympics are on par with, or even grander, than the World Tour as far as prestigious awards go. And they might have a valid point. But to understand what the Olympics represent to snowboarding you have to understand the general lack of interest the snowboarding world has in the Olympics. Skiers have always run Olympic snowboarding, and that has always irked a large segment of snowboarding loyalist, both inside and outside the industry.
The Olympics appeal to what industry insiders call “middle America” but to have a truly successful snowboarding world tour and world champion you’d have to find a way to not alienate snowboarding’s core. Sure there are surfers that despise the World Tour, young free surfer Noah Deane even gained infamy with his profanity-laced, anti-WSL tirade at the 2014 Surfer Poll, but quickly apologized for his actions after heavy scrutiny from surfers, surf companies and the media. If a professional snowboarder did the same, no one would bat an eye, in fact one of snowboarding’s most elite legends (and recent homophobe) Terje Haakonsen has publicly denounced the Olympics since snowboarding’s inclusion. For perspective, that’d be on par with someone like Kelly Slater saying “f*&% the WSL” as opposed to a free surfer who’s never had the intentions of competing anyway.
When I recently spoke with Olympian and X-Games gold medalist Danny Davis, he confirmed these sentiments regarding snowboarding’s lack of a true world tour or champion. He even went further, questioning if snowboarding could ever have something remotely close to the CT, given the repetitive nature of halfpipe riding, and the lack of variation in each rider’s run.
And that’s a huge part of the problem, unlike the CT, which has a variety of waves from the playful performance surfing on tap at Lower Trestles to the thundering giants featured at Teahupo’o, Fiji, and Pipe, variety is a huge part of the tour’s allure. Snowboarding competitions have never been able to replicate this. The only snowboarding comp that has ever had anything even remotely close was Travis Rice’s Supernatural event, a quasi-backcountry event at Nelson, B.C.’s Baldface lodge, which seemed like a logistical nightmare and not something easily replicated.
As snowboarding looks to find ways to rekindle its once almost unstoppable growth, it would behoove those at the top to look at surfing and its relative success (hey, no entity is truly perfect). Will snowboarding ever have a world tour followed by millions and celebrated by the media? Not without some serious outside the box thinking. For now, we’ll have to appreciate people like Davis and Rice who work diligently to organize unique events celebrated by both core snowboarders and “middle America” alike.
