Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25044
Championships, comes from dues paid by its 1,200 members and grants from the Snowsports Industries of Great Britain (51GB). The BSA linked with other ski industries to introduce the alpine side of the sport at the first British Championships in 1989, held in Glenshee, Scotland. At that time, the sport was still so marginal that Needham and fellow Hillingdon stalwart Weasel found themselves among the top ten, along with the eight other entrants. Knowing next to nothing about boarding protocol, they had to ask the timing official which way to ride around the gates in the slalom. Now at the Dry Slope Championships, riders are required to demonstrate both free-riding and alpine skills before a panel of judges. A summer-long series of regional, independent and informal. "fun" com petitions fuel the championship-and draw more participants. "It means," Needham explains, "that if someone doesn't think they can win, they might go for their latest trick and see if they can stick it. That way the crowd gets to see cutting-edge snowboard ing, the riders get to ride a long time and nobody loses. I run fun . comps because if every competition people enter is boring, they're not going to enter the nationals and there'll be no progression." A case in point is the career of Pat Meurier, 25, a rider with a distinctive blond,streak in his jet black hair. Recognized as one of the freshest dry slope talents in the country, Meurier spends four months a year touring snowboarding events. Meurier first came across snow- mag,ne a c a,n- InK , . . I h . plastic bristles can �go. He was a skier at the time, but all the other people on the trip were 'boarding while on holiday six years rip your ,ngersus don't get to ride snow much maybe one week a year. So we f. them centers. at off if you catcHhought, we'll get as good as we can in the hollow Meurier was spotted on the dry 30 m, on a dry slope, then when we get out on snow, it'll be one hell of a blast." . • slopes by Martin Robinson, owner of 540, a snowboarding distribution and leSTlarketing company. Robinson offered to sponsor Meurier through his clients an h r K2 (boards), Twist (clothing) and Level In the early days of British 0 u , .(gloves). boarding the only way to get hold of snowboarding product was to ring up the parent company in the US. There was such a small foreign mar ket that companies did not actively seek international business. The worldwide spread of snowboarding culture has changed all that. Now, as Robinson explains, "Companies are watching the dry slope scene in the UK. They know a lot of the talented, young kids can't afford to go away for a season because it's far too much money, and they have schooL" "We as a nation are not going to be Olympic contenders," he adds forthrightly, "but we do have a lot of riders who surprise the Americans with how good they are. Because the facilities are not readily available, people make that extra effort." Robinson sponsors riders at three different levels: those who only dry-slope in regional competitions; those who dry-slope in summer and ride snow in winter; and those who spend a lot of time in America or live on the Continent and mainly ride snow. Robinson also runs his own 540 team, which is made up of nine riders, and also heads up K2's British team. Snowboarding's expenses, the main issue holding back young riders from competing abroad on snow, is eased by such spon sorship. At Hillingdon, a young girl comes in from the slope, annoyed because she's damaged her board while trying to ollie a ra"mp. Meurier commiserates with her, explaining, "That's one of the hardships of dry- fence covered withsnowboarders and dry-slope veterans. h dry-slope competition, gave it a try and learn to snowboard," he says. "Most of Intrigued, Meurier went to a summer lit a'tstarted competing. "I used to dry-slope as a way to sloping-it ruins boards. They may only last two or three mon!hs. You need boards where the P-Tex by the edge is a lot harder and with good tip protection, because if you come down on those it just blows the nose apart totally." The problem is less acute at the Snowdome in Tamworth, Europe's only indoor real-snow slope. With two rope tows and one mov ing carpet, it is groomed four times a day. First Leisure, an entertainment conglomerate that bought the Snowdome in November 1995, plans to build another larger indoor slope that can take about 500,000 visitors a year. The company's investment suggests that it sees no plateau in the winter sports boom, which has been fueled by intense media interest in snowboarding over the last couple of years and appropriated by music videos, magazine photo shoots and ad campaigns. In the UK, snowboarding even has its own TV show-Board Stupid-which was originally commissioned as a sports program by Britain's Channel 4. After a three-season run in the winter months, its focus has widen·ed to present an informed view of British snowboarding culture, thanks in part to Phil Young, the veteran British rider who fronts the show. Young, like Needham, started ten years ago with a homemade board, basically a piece of plywood with a pair of roller-skate boots nailed to it, and first rode it on a school ski trip to the Alps. "We spent more time painting pictures on the front than we did actually making the boards," he recalls, "but they got us down the mountain." Since then he has been an active boarding proponent and even publishes his own magazine, Ergo Sum, which covers a trinity of alternative sports-BMX, skate boarding and snowboarding-and the attendant fashion and music. "There's a lot more to snow boarding in this country than actually going down a mountain. There's a whole culture that revolves around it. You spend as much time with the same people in the summer as you do in the winter. It's a big family." Young's involvement in this "cul ture" has attracted other top British riders like Steve Bailey, the 1996 British Freestyle _��fo:ႀ䊉 Champion, to Board Stupid. Producer Martin Perry has made a point of using independent filmmakers and video directors to steer the program away from the traditional sports coverage look. The majority of footage is shot with Super a and 16-mm film, giving it a grittier feel. "We've tried to give a sense of the experience of snowboarding, not just show nice pictures of it," explains Perry. Perry sees snowboarding as connecting directly with the zeit geist of British culture. "People in Britain are bored with the mainstream and the usual agenda," he asserts. "Snowboarding is a way to express yourself and do something completely different." And now snowboarders have turned their pastime into an industry: Last year marked England's first all-snowboarding trade show, Board X. In terms of cultural crossover, Robinson believes the public sup port of such major British pop stars and boarders as Goldie, Prodigy and Jamiroquai, and of dance culture as a whole, is paramount in the promo tion of the snowboarding lifestyle. Given snowboarding's close connec tion to music, kids identify with its mindset, activity and lifestyle more easily than they would with that of established national sports such as soccer and rugby. "A lot of people see snowboarding as a street-related moun tain sport. Even if you can't get to the mountains, you can still buy the clothing," says Robinson. The result: up to 70 percent of snowboard clothing sold in the UK will never see a snow-covered slope. In the meantime, would-be boarders literally shred their boards on the unforgiving dry slopes, honing their downhill skills. II