Billabong Air & Style
From snowy hills to packed stadia, is this snowboarding’s natural conclusion?
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Saturday has come. Hordes of fans descend on the stadium. Their hats, scarves and tops proudly chant their allegiances. Programmes are stuffed in hand. Hastily parked vans are serving out cold drinks and steaming hot dogs: extra ketchup, extra mustard, soggy napkin. Cash changes hands. Lager and energy drinks are necked in preparation for kick off - and the police and yellow-vested security are keeping a watchful eye.
But this arena of conflict isn’t Highbury, The Bernabéu or Old Trafford, this is the Bergisel Stadium, a former-Olympic ski jumping venue that sits atop a hilly knoll overlooking the Tyrolean town of Innsbruck in Austria.
And the sport isn’t football. The supporters are here to watch their favourite snowboarders compete at the Billabong Air and Style, a 6-star TTR World Tour contest. And from the crowds that flock here, it’s kind of a big deal.
From appearances, it seems that these modern snowboard comps have come to mimic their former antithesis. Today, they borrow heavily from the successful (read: lucrative) formula of Association Football. It’s all instant replays, ad breaks and replica kits, but with added beats and pundits emcees name-dropping brands and hollow hype.
Much like the fluid transfers in the football market, at this level in snowboarding, faces and team allegiances are in rapid flux. The term ‘all star’ doesn’t exist here. You see, it’s not the biggest snow-celebs who are throwing down in this big air contest: it’s simply a gang of post-pubescent pros who just happen to be doing the biggest airs and most technical spins, flips and double corks this season. There’s no Terjes, Whites or Brights: just fresh out of the academy shredders with an appetite for fame, winnings and a nonchalant take on an icy faceplant. But those who do drop in, it’s one hell of a platform to one-up and think big. Who wouldn’t want to nail their personal best at such a young age, backed up by thousands of people cheering you on?
There’s no time for nostalgia either. While some conservative old sages - feeling isolated from the sport that used to be theirs – may sigh and cry ‘back to the roots’, deep down they know they got what they wished for. When they took ownership and talked up ‘development’, ‘progression’ and ‘pushing the sport’, this is its logical conclusion. It’s a simple capitalist process: increased demand, increased profits, co-option. The Man will always win, because he is man. Football used to just be jumpers for goal posts at one time, it was just a long, long time before someone decided to stand sideways on a snowy plank. Snowboarding, it seems, has caught up very quickly.
Remember this though: every stadium that’s filled, every product that’s endorsed and every TV rights deal that’s signed still doesn’t stop two people kicking a can in the street.
No one can own that.
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Billabong Air & Style (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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