Mathieu Crépel Mass Appeal
Is French pro Mathieu Crépel set to become snowboarding’s next big superstar?
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The shrill cheers cut through the deep throbbing house bass echoing around the natural amphitheatre of Plagne Bellecote, a small satellite cluster of apartment blocks and fast food restaurants in the Paradiski area of the French Alps. It's early April and the sun is drenching both riders and spectators alike with its warm glow. They are gathered here for Chromatophobia, a unique super pipe competition.
Whereas other competitions keep to a traditional format that sees riders execute their lines with android precision, having done so infinite times before in practice, Chromatophobia is different. The previous night saw each rider write down a trick that then got placed in a hat. Two of these were then picked at random for every competitor to either include in their runs, or face having their final score halved. And last night in the lobby of a rather opulent hotel, an alley-oop backside rodeo and a corked frontside 7 were selected to a few cries of, "What? Are you fucking kidding me?" For some of the riders, such tricks just don't feature in their repertoire.
This new concept is the brainchild of Mathieu Crépel, the French world champion snowboarder who introduced this compulsory trick aspect at his own invitational big air contest in the Pyrenees last year. "Nowadays, all the contests have pretty much the same tricks. Riders work on a run all season long, and if it's good enough, they can pretty much win everything with that one same run. And that kinda sucks," he told me earlier that day in the hotel bar, overlooking the slopes of La Plagne. "Snowboarding is a creative sport and we needed a format that would show that. Even though we picked pretty basic tricks, some of the top riders won't be able to do them, and that's exciting."
But as the competition gets underway, there is something missing. Surely the architect of such an event should be dropping in before anyone else? Crépel, however, is injured - badly. Having broken his foot riding in Japan six weeks earlier, he walks with a delicate tread after coming out of the cast the week before. I had first met Crépel at the Burton European Open in Laax a few months earlier. Back then, when I caught up with him between runs, he was bright and professionally obliging, breaking away from the crowds of riders that constantly flocked around him to do a quick interview. But now, despite maintaining the polite amenability that makes him such a popular character, he also seems distracted.
"You seem a little unhappy?" I put it to him.
There's an awkward pause. He inhales and turns to look out the window where the sun is breaking over the horizon. "When you are hurt like this," he says almost mournfully, "that's when you understand why snowboarding is your life."
A dramatic statement, sure, but duly grounded on personal history. Hailing from the resort of La Mongie, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, Crépel was born into a family of keen skiers. "As soon as I could walk I was on skis - training, racing, all that stuff," he tells me. His dad, a former ski instructor, made the switch to snowboards in the mid 1980s and, according to Crépel, was the first snowboarder in the whole of the Pyrénées. Later, he would give a seven-year-old Mathieu a home-made snowboard fitted with ski bindings that had been cut down to fit him, and with that, Mathieu the skier was gone forever. "After that, I just stopped skiing - I hated it," he chuckles, his mood seeming to brighten as he reminisces.
In the years that followed, he would regularly make the trek with his parents across the breadth of France to compete in as many contests as possible. Such commitment meant leaving school on a Friday afternoon, driving through the night, competing and then making the same long journey home to be back at school for Monday morning. "So having to do that each week, you really didn't want to fuck up a contest," he says. "I think it gave me a little more motivation than the others."
Mathieu's professional career really took off when, at the age of fifteen, he was picked by Terje Haakonsen to compete at the Arctic Challenge in Norway. In the ten years since, his life has been one snow season after the next, with his competing in the half pipe at the 2006 Olympics and winning the TTR that very same year. Although he failed to win a medal at the Olympics, he has already qualified for the 2010 Games in Vancouver.
After years of such dedication, does he ever feel that he missed out on some of his childhood? "When I was fifteen, I would see my friends having a normal life, going to school every day and partying," he says. "I couldn't do any of that so I lost contact with some really good people. But I don't think I've missed out because snowboarding has given me a lot of other things."
The original article features in HUCK#015, out now.
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Mathieu Crépel (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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