The Brits: Unsung Heroes part one
Meeting the people who makes the UK snow festival what it is.
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Now in its 22nd year, The Brits is the main event in the UK snow calendar.
The week-long festival brings together riders young and old in the beautiful, if somewhat slushy, resort of Laax, Switzerland for an array of contests and parties.
Behind the festivities, HUCK meets the different characters that make it all happen...
The Grom
Name: Rowan Coultas
Age: 13
Riding since: 2009
“The Brits is a good time to see your mates. When you meet new people they can teach you stuff, but the best piece of advice I was ever given is to have fun! As a young rider, it’s good to have the British freestyle team around too, which has quite a high standard. The future looks bright for UK snowboarding, I hope.”
The Judge
Name: Will Hughes
Age: 35
Riding since: 1991
“The Brits are really important to the UK snowboarding scene. You need to get all the riders together to see what everyone’s doing and the new kids coming up, otherwise there wouldn’t really be a scene. It’s really important for the kids as well to get introduced to professional snowboarding as a first step. There’s no other event like it.”
The Musician
Name: Mr Bruce of The Correspondents
Age: Young enough to wear bespoke spandex
Riding since: Riding what?
“The Correspondents have never played a snowboarding gig before and now we have two: the Brits and Snowbombing. It’s a really new, quite alien environment, but everyone seems very nice. It’s a demographic that we have never played to but I think it’ll be a good, fun festival crowd. Christian Stevenson saw us at Lovebox and Bestival and recommended us.”
The Coach
Name: Hamish McKnight
Age: 29
Riding since: 1995
“The Brits has to be the pinnacle event in the UK calendar. The best come through, unless they struggle to attend. The UK industry’s always been – product-wise – better than it needs to be about supporting young riders coming through. The bigger issue is the facilities they get to train on and what’s expected from high level snowboarding. My interest is in moving that bar up.”
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The Brits: Unsung Heroes part one (text) by Liz Seabrook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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