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A trip down memory lane

If last week's column proved anything it proved you shouldn't mix national and local politics and the World Ski and Snowboard Festival in the same 1,100 words. The Festival deserves all of 'em. And this week, I'm making amends.
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If last week's column proved anything it proved you shouldn't mix national and local politics and the World Ski and Snowboard Festival in the same 1,100 words. The Festival deserves all of 'em. And this week, I'm making amends.

Having hit sweet 16, it also deserves a whirlwind snapshot of its previous 15 years. So here we go.

It was 1995 when it all started. A festival in April? In a ski town? What kind of notion was that?

"Ridiculous? How about desperate? Insane? Whacko? All those epithets were applied to the Festival's founder, Doug Perry. I know, because I applied most of them. Let's face it, you have to be a bit of all those to launch the World Technical Skiing Championship at a time of year when all but the most hard-core sliders have put away their snow gear and gotten out their surfboards."

"The WTSC was an instant success... as long as you can stretch the definition of success to include working for nothing, suggesting to stakeholders they hadn't lost their entire investment - it was just hiding - and digging the Zen of the sound of one hand clapping, that being about all the applause generated the first year."

I don't remember year two but year three? "An obscure band called Nickelback played for $500 and a case of beer. They took the stage in the centre of town and rattled the windows of every condo around. The villagers broke out their torches and came looking for whomever was responsible. The rest of the entertainment budget was blown on flowers and 'I'm sorry' gifts."

But it was a groundbreaker. No longer just about athletics, the Festival began to break new cultural ground, adding more events each subsequent year. Of course, not all events were particularly appreciated. 1998's installment, as reported by the RCMP, was "...just a spark away from a riot. The festival crowd was partaking freely of liquor and narcotics..." which resulted in an "...infamous snowball fight..." wherein the crowd, "...inflamed by the emcee who egged (them) into throwing snowballs at the VIPs on the deck of the GLC..." resulted in the "...liquor store being overrun and... 15 arrests."

By my reckoning, that's pretty much when we all decided this thing was a total success. And so it went, through the years.

In 1999, "In a town rife with irony, the World Ski and Snowboard Festival, rolling through the valley for the next 10 days, verily drips with the stuff.  It is the dessert table at a diabetic convention. The two-foot powder dump on freshly plowed golf course greens. The drowning man's glass of water."

"The Festival is the Frankenstein monster of our own mad scientist and way-cool Party Dude. Working secretly in the laboratory hidden behind the false panel in his house, he laboured for years stitching together a body made from disparate bits of mountain kulture, grafting in the nervous system of nonstop rock 'n' roll in all of its current mutations, and finally wiring in the brain of a hungover Aussie at the end of a five month bender still ready to go out and party some more as soon as he steals a clean shirt from his unsuspecting roommate."

The 2003 edition was, "Whistler's collective orgasm after a season of endless foreplay and wet spots as large as, well, as large as Whistler and Blackcomb. We've managed to keep it up without any signs of softening since the first rousing teases of December, through the crush of Christmas, the rain of January, April in February and a March best forgotten, lost in its own fog. If we survive the next 10 days, the town can collectively lean back on one elbow, smoke a cigarette, and hope this partner finally has the good sense to get dressed and leave so we can peacefully move on to spring skiing or roll back over and sleep 'til noon. As one notable local politician is fond of saying, 'If you can make it through WSSF without drugs and with your clothes still on, you shouldn't be here in the first place.'"

The next year's edition was all about coming together, blurring the lines between us and them, them being those who slid on equipment different from ours... if that makes any sense.

"In social microcosms so secular they're damn near atheistic, the tribes have migrated to this tiny, bucolic - but increasingly urban - Ville de Plaisir to duke it out with each other on the Sacred Slopes of Whistler and Blackcomb. At stake, at least in the minds of the combatants, is none other than the burning cross question of who sits at the right hand of God. Who can lay claim to embodying the Way, the Truth, the Life? If Vikings sail into Valhalla on a burning ship, will the disparate tribes of Mountain Kulture slide into Heaven on skis, or boards?"

The answer was found in True North fashion: In the hockey arena. "The Shredders won, sad to say. The score was something like 327 to 1 and proved, once and for all, that snowboarders - once they've freed their feet from boardage - can actually control their direction of travel. Or it proved beyond doubt that skiers who've drunk and smoked enough to render themselves totally insensate can't play hockey well enough to beat the Junior Varsity team from CNIB."

I still haven't decided where I stand on 2006's bold foray into, ugh, fashion. But there were others in town very excited about that year's Fashion Exposed. "Either way, part peep show, part runway, all it needs is a brass pole to make all the horny homies happy and the rest of us entertained on what would otherwise be just another Thursday night in paradise.

Everything changed the next year. "Gone is the founder and Party Dude for Life. Without so much as a horse head in his bed, the MotherCorp and Tourism Whistler made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

Things were now in the hands of "Festival Goddess Sue Eckersley and the rest of the very talented Women of Watermark." I may, that first year, have likened Sue to a shark, but only in the sense her philosophy of the festival was embodied by the phrase, "Keep moving or die!"

And so it has. Always with one eye on the past and one on the future, the Festival is an unlikely success story in an unlikely successful ski town. It embodies the spirit of what's made Whistler one of the top ski towns in the world: Start small, build on your strengths, follow the guiding vision laid down by people blessed with vision... and have faith in yourself.

Keep the faith, you sassy 16-year-old.