James Stentiford interview
HUCK talks to the veteran snowboarder about his return to the Freeride World Tour.
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“I don't want freeriding getting more popular, it means less powder for me,” jokes snowboarder James Stentiford over a bowl of steaming pumpkin soup in a fancy East London eatery, the perfect antidote to the rapidly declining temperatures outside on this November afternoon.
He's here as part of a delegation promoting the new season of the Freeride World Tour, the big mountain ski and snowboard contest circuit that takes riding back to its fundamentals in such places as Chamonix, Røldal in Norway and the formidable pyramid peak of the Bec des Rosses in Verbier, Switzerland.
The fact that Stentiford has been chosen for such a task seems like the obvious choice. The 40-year-old is one a seasonnaire who just kept on chasing the ride, spending countless years based in Chamonix in the pursuit of powder. After entering the odd comp of the FWT over the years, last season saw him have a shot at the title, competing in five of the six events and finishing a respectable sixth, and he's back again this year.
“I thought I should give it a crack. I'd been doing my own thing and suddenly thought, 'maybe I'm good enough?',” he explains. “Even though I've been riding for so long, it's still a learning process. It's not like going out when you are filming because you look at a line and think 'if I fall, it doesn't matter, I can go up and do something else'. But in this contest, you've only got one opportunity. You want to risk it but not too much.”
Such ambitions for someone of his age is not uncommon on the Freeride World Tour. Last year's top three competitors of Mitch Tölderer, Flo Orley and Xavier de le Rue have a collective age that well exceeds 100 - standing in stark contrast to the youth worship of the freestyle orientated contests of the TTR World Tour and the Winter X Games. You see, when it comes to negotiating steep snowy terrain, experience matters.
“Freeriding is psychological. It's confidence and belief that's the biggest battle. If you keep yourself physically strong, you can still be competitive. You learn from your experiences and you can't teach that,” says James. “Take a look at Kelly Slater, he's 40 in February and I think the perception of the longevity of athletes is changing. A 40 year old 50 years ago was probably very different to a forty year old now.”
Despite the rigourous safety checks of the FWT made in cooperation with local guides of the tour, the threats of avalanches, rockfalls and hidden crevasses are all still things that lurk in the back of the mind for any competitor. “It's so much fun that you don't really realise the consequences until you come close to something really dangerous,” he says. “In the mountains, 99 times out of 100, you'll get away with it, but it's that one time...so every time you go, you've got to treat it like it is that one time. You can't let your guard down.”
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James Stentiford interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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