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WSSF 2005: It’s the arts, Hucker

The festival is as much a celebration of ski and snowboard culture as it is about skiing and snowboarding

By G.D. Maxwell

Everybody knows the story by now. Doug Perry, professional skier, semi-professional ski bum, pulls up a chess board, stares down Death and averts what could have been the mother of all premature mid-life crises.

Fresh from a smokin’ tour of the All Japan Technical Ski Championships with the Salomon international pro team, Doug knew two things for certain. One was he had a jones for skiing as big as all outdoors. The other was he had the knees of a recreational skier, not a pro.

Facin’ the grim prospect of being a washed-up ex-pro skier selling life insurance or… or redefining his reality to include something, anything, that kept him in the skiing game but not in one of its existing boxes – instructor, bum, sales rep, bum, coach, bum – he came up with the brilliantly hare-brained scheme to launch the World Technical Skiing Championships.

Saddled with a turn of phrase having all the cachet of a casket catalog, a roster of events that included speed skiing, powder 8s, freestyle and something called the Bigfoot Challenge, Doug decided on an improbable hat trick. He decided to hold the whole thing during the height of the end of the season… April.

Brilliant was not the descriptor that came to most people’s minds. Truth be told, it seemed more like a slow, painful form of suicide.

"Sponsors were scarce; spectators scarcer," Doug said of that first year. Undeterred, he soldiered on.

Things went downhill from there.

"There almost wasn’t a second annual whatever," he said. The event’s seed money didn’t sprout, sponsors were skeptical and no one was getting paid. The only ones who were having a good time were the athletes – because they played a lead role in designing the competitive events – and partygoers who, let’s face it, have a good time no matter who throws the party.

Fast forward a few years and, voila! Doug adds music to the mix, the crowd goes crazy, the anything-for-a-free-lunch ski media types hype what has morphed into one smokin’ end-of-season party and the World Ski and Snowboard Festival becomes the shining light of Mountain Kulture. A bona fide don’t-miss event.

And now it’s 10 years old. Happy Birthday Big Boy.

Of course, the 10 th annual edition of Doug’s Excellent Adventure bears less resemblance to the first than Whistler 2005 bears to Whistler 1995. Virtually none of the original events have survived. The addition of music spawned the addition of arts and the festival has become an extravaganza of photography, filmmaking, story telling, art, music, dancing and some of the most over-the-top skiing and riding and rail jamming ever featured in a humble Canadian ski town.

Snow… Snow… We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Snow

But now the question arises: What’s a world-famous snow sports festival supposed to do when there ain’t no snow?

It’s the arts, Hucker!

According to Doug, heading into its second decade, the World Ski and Snowboard Festival has a new rallying cry: "When the snow’s not there, call the artists in."

"Between the musicians, the filmmakers, the new visual artists, the writers, the DJs and the dancers, we’re talking about 600 artists who’ll be involved in this festival. There’s going to be the most incredible concentration of artists and art; everyday you’ll be able to see something that’ll blow you away."

Okay, this is not to say there aren’t skiers and riders. There are. And it’s not to say Whistler hasn’t had any winter. We have. Most recently – and heavily – earlier this month when winter finally arrived after our spring of discontent. And it most certainly isn’t to say Whistler was closed, even though that seemed to be the self-serving rumour around North American ski resorts.

But notably absent this year are the skier and boarder Big Air events that have bookended the festival in seasons past. The twin spectacles, extravaganzas of acrobatic flight, music, lights, dancers, bizarre costumed creatures and at least one unexpected, drunken Big Air crasher – a visiting stockbroker who, on a bet, slipped past security and tried his own, inept hand at altering the laws of physics – have jammed Skier’s Plaza with upwards of 10,000 spectators, infused the whole affair with a vitality that fuelled its legend and driven security personnel and RCMP around the bend trying to keep the whole thing from blowing up.

But Big Air was always a challenge to mount in April. Groomers, a stalwart group keen on trying the impossible, would begin to cache extra snow near the base of the mountain weeks in advance, stockpiling mountains of the stuff to build the approach, kicker and landing zone. Alas, the pragmatic decision was made earlier this season to cancel Big Air because some challenges are simply too big and the air at the base of Whistler this winter has been too warm and too wet. In a season when snowmaking often amounted to snow farming and even occasionally meant moving snow by helicopter from one place to another, there simply weren’t any extra flakes to stash in what too often seemed the tropical paradise of Whistler Village.

Is Doug worried about the air being let out of the festival, so to speak?

"I don’t see it as a doom and gloom scenario. The festival has, over the years, snow-proofed itself to a certain degree. With the addition of new content every year, the festival’s as much a celebration of ski and snowboard culture as it is about skiing and snowboarding.

"Besides, we’ve got two major, on-mountain events and probably the strongest lineup of athletes we’ve ever had. There’s the World Skiing Invitational and the World Snowboarding Invitational. Both of them are similar in design, based on athlete feedback. Number one choice of what the athletes wanted was slopestyle; number two, rails; number three, superpipe and last, believe it or not, was big air. That’s from the athletes’ perspective. The public’s perspective is different. They love big air. More people will come and watch a big air because it’s so accessible. And it’s fun. And it’s a scene. Fewer people will go up the mountain to watch a slopestyle but nonetheless, that’s what the athletes want."

And the promoter?

"If there was a huge snowpack, there would be a big air in the valley." ‘Nuf said.

The other fatality of this year’s fickle winter was a new, old-time event, a blast from the past added to the festival’s lineup, a good ol’, rip-roaring Gelandesprung. Holy Wayne Wong Batman, did you say Gelandesprung? Yeah, baby. Get out the long boards, the stretchies, the white sunnies and all the nerve you can muster. But you’ll have to wait ‘til next year.

Gelande, a cross between ski jumping, big air and the ever-popular cliff hucking, was a regular feature on Whistler Mountain’s Ridge Runner in the Before Time. That’s before lawyers, before snowboards, before skiing as Big Bidniz, before pipes, parks and Freeskiing, before the professionalization of every 13-year-old who turns tricks on twin tips and before we knew skiing was supposed to be anything but fun. As a "sport" Gelande pretty much consisted of starting at the top of Ridge Run, going like hell down the slope, taking to the air and seeing how far down the hill you could land… in whatever downhill gear you happened to have on at the time… oh yeah, before helmets.

Wayne would come up from Burnaby and Jim McConkey would let someone else mind the ski school while the springtime crowd would watch in awe and wait patiently for the inevitable mix of speed, sunshine, enthusiasm and not quite enough talent to result in a spectacular wipeout by someone who had said, just moments earlier, "Bet I can do that too."

But in the first half of March, no one knew for certain it was going to snow like crazy the last half of March. The decision had to be made, the pin had to be pulled a month ago when the upper half of Whistler Mountain seemed to be covered with a thin layer of white concrete. "That’s really too bad," Doug explained. "I saw some old black and white footage recently that The Reverend Varrin had playing at the GLC of McConk and Wong and it was amazing. I couldn’t believe it. There was a lot of disappointment cancelling the Gelande because there were a lot of skiers coming out of the woodwork for it."

We Got Slidin’. We Got Music. We Got Culture. Hey! It’s a Party.

So I guess that leaves an empty village and not much in the way of snow sports for this year’s festival, eh?

Hardly! "The terrain park at Blackcomb, the Higher Level Park, will become an arena for two major slopestyle competitions – one for skiers and one for boarders. It’ll be like having five big airs in a row. Every rider will interpret the massive hits on that course a little bit different. So they’ll have successive hits – pulling the same kind of tricks they’d do in a big air – land and then do a rail and go to another feature and do another hit and then over to the other side and do another hit. So it’s pure athletic expression, using the full park as an arena."

Which means, starting Friday, April 8 th , there’ll be six days of on-mountain action in the terrain park. Insider’s tip: Some of the best vantage points for watching the action will be from a perch on Catskinner chair. It’s slow enough to catch the fast-paced action and for an extra $20 the lifties might be bribed to slow it down even more.

Too bad about the lack of action in the village though.

"Are you kidding?" asks Doug. "I fully expect the village will be packed without Big Air. We have a huge concert the first Saturday night with a multiple Juno-nominated band called Finger Eleven. There’s another concert with Hot Hot Heat and a beer garden in Skier’s Plaza, the next night. The second Saturday is going to be a spectacle. We’re going to have the Battle of the Beats. We’re going to have multiple DJs and MCs battling each other. Breakdancers battling against each other. It’s going to be fun and entertaining. It’s going to be a town party."

And every night in between, there’ll be something to do, watch, or sneak into. This year’s Pro Photographer showdown is a retrospective with seven of the past winners showing their stuff, new and old. There are more teams than ever in the Filmmaker’s Showdown. Words and Stories will include a couple of spoken word performers. Twenty-four crazy writers will take two-hour shifts in a gondola car in the village to hammer out the Collective Novel Experience. The usual gang of suspects will be running the Whistler Village Logo Farm and, of course, there’ll be the fabled industry parties to crash.

New and of note on the artistic side this year is Masterpiece in Motion and Brave Art. Masterpiece in Motion has tapped into the worldwide and local artistic community and challenged artists to design topsheets for snowboards. The response has been overwhelming, with 150 local school kids submitting designs and numerous artists from everywhere vying to infuse the slopes with rideable art. Now if they could just do something about the oh-so bland, graphically-challenged world ski designers seem to be mired in.

And Brave Art will showcase another 25 artists in the gallery formerly known as the gondola rental shop at the base of Whistler Mountain. The works, drawn from snowboard, skate and surf culture, will include paintings, sculpture and, well, some things are just difficult to classify. But it’s all art and it’s all good.

So, even though the snow has finally come and the skiing and riding are as good as spring skiing and riding get, this year’s instalment of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival, while paying homage to its snow sport roots, is so full of art and entertainment, you just might be too worn out to make it up the mountains.

Just kidding. Daytime’s for riding; nighttime’s for play. Kinda like a mullet when you think about it – business on top, party in the back. Hey, wait a minute… Doug, I’ve got a great idea for a competition next year: The Extreme Mullet Experience!



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