Andreas Wiig All above board
Straddling the gap between those who live the dream and those who sell it, Andreas Wiig is one pro snowboarder who seems to have the business game sussed.
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“Do you think a lot of people are interested in snowboarding in London?” asks Andreas Wiig, having just signed an autograph for a passerby. In fairness, the kid seemed lured in more by the small throng of cameras than any recognition of who the twenty-nine-year-old Norwegian is, and he seems to have picked up on that.
It’s late September and Wiig is here fulfilling his pre-season industry duties, showing his face at a shop signing at The Snowboard Asylum in Covent Garden as one his sponsors, Forum, tours their new film, Fuck It, around Europe. It’s the first time he’s been approached on the street. He may have claimed slopestyle gold in front of an audience of millions at the Winter X Games in both 2007 and 2008 – making him of the few riders to have ever beaten Shaun White – but to anyone not familiar with snowboarding, Wiig is just another dude in a plaid shirt hanging on a street corner.
After a short walk down to the banks of the River Thames – with Wiig pushing along on a cruiser board to stop himself from ollieing and further damaging the broken ankle that put him out of business for most of last season – we return to the tour bus, a large black coach with Fuck It scrawled across the side. It’s early on in the tour, but the malaise has set in: stories circulate of police searches, marijuana stashed in bins to avoid sniffer dogs and indiscreet sexual conquests. But in this sea of energy drinks and lads-on-tour exuberance, Wiig seems relaxed – detached, perhaps, from the juvenile antics he’s surrounded by.
“I don’t pay much attention to it because I’m used to being around nineteen-year-olds,” he says diplomatically when I ask about the age difference between him and the rest of the team. “It’s not like I’m the old dad saying, ‘Turn it down, guys.’ It’s not like that.”
Diplomatic feels like a good starting point when describing Andreas Wiig. He sits calmly, fixes you with a courteous stare and reels off answers that seem considered, yet guarded at the same time. But there is a real intelligence that permeates through.
[...] But in order to understand this consummate professional, it’s important to understand how far he has come. Hailing from the small town of Asker near Oslo, Norway, Wiig started snowboarding as a “more playful” alternative to skiing. From age eleven, he bore the brunt of icy conditions on his local mountain of Vardaasen, a 300m strip that only opened its slopes for a few months a year, building DIY kickers with friends as he “was always into jumping”.
By the time he was sixteen, Wiig had given up playing football on a regional team to concentrate on snowboarding. But aware of his situational limitations, he headed out to spend a few months riding Mammoth Mountain in California with some of his friends when he was nineteen, borrowing money from his parents to fund his stay. “We went there to have fun but at the same time, I really wanted to get somewhere in snowboarding,” recalls Wiig, readily volunteering his early ambition to turn pro.
And it worked. A chance collision on the slopes with a cameraman working for prolific filmmaker Mike ‘Mack Dawg’ McEntire saw Wiig granted a small, nine-trick video part in 2001’s Stand and Deliver. Major sponsors soon voiced an interest and Wiig has remained a prominent force in snowboarding ever since, hopping between core companies like Jeenyus (now defunct), Omatic, Nitro and now Forum, while representing snowboarding’s mainstream-friendly side by way of Vans and the aforementioned Rockstar. Indeed, Wiig straddles an industry that can so often pull riders in opposite directions. He is the guy who spurned the grassroots TTR World Tour in favour of corporate made-for-TV spectacles like the Winter X Games and Dew Tour. But he’s also the guy who’s gained respect across the board, thanks to his ability to balance his seasons and log solid, dependable video parts – in classics like Video Gangs by Forum and more recently Standard Film’s Black Winter – whilst still competing.
You can’t help but feel that any success Wiig has enjoyed has been entirely of his own making: the outcome of strategic calculations, as opposed to dumb luck. He recalls ignoring some early career advice he got from the filmers of //Video Gangs// to not bother with competitions. So what drove him down the competitive path?
“It wasn’t about winning, it was about, er… developing myself as a rider, I think – mostly,” says Wiig. “The contests made me a stronger rider. It was fun too, but it wasn’t like I didn’t want to win. The better I did, the more fun it got.”
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Andreas Wiig (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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