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You’re only as young as you play

They’re known as the Greys on Trays, sixty-somethings who are psyched to snowboard.

They’re known as the Greys on Trays, sixty-somethings who are psyched to snowboard. They head the Whistler gondola lineup on powder days and they rip on race boards. The new face of snowboarding is an old one.

Gary Baker will never forget the first time he saw a snowboarder on Whistler.

The teenager came from nowhere, hit his two-year-old daughter and sent her flying.

"I was ready to outlaw them then and there. I was furious," the 66-year-old recalled recently.

That was years ago. Baker was a seasoned skier and his sentiments were shared by many, ski resort owners among them.

Bans on numerous mountains followed but snowboarder numbers grew regardless, forcing skier acceptance.

"There were more and more (boarders). If you can’t beat them join them," was Baker’s take on the matter five years ago.

He took up boarding at 61, a sofa pillow unabashedly strapped to his bum.

"The first time I fell on my behind I saw stars," he said.

"I strapped and duck-taped a pillow there for the first few days after that.

"There were looks (from people) but none that bothered me.

"Most people on the bunny hills thought it was a good idea.

"Skiing came very naturally to me but boarding didn’t."

Good friends Dale Reynolds, Tom Thomson and Ron Slack were already on snowboards – distinctive racing or carving boards they still use most days.

Reynolds began at 50, leaving his skis in storage for a new pursuit he’d been watching develop over the years.

Like Baker, boarding had initially left him unimpressed.

"It was a very different board then – like a small surfboard with a rope on the front," he said of his first encounter with a snowboarder back in the late 1970s.

"He’d put some Sorrel boots on and kept them tight with bike inner tube elastics.

"I thought it was kind of stupid because nobody knew how to ride them.

"The next year I thought: some of them are having fun.

"The next year all of them were and the next year I was thinking: they’re having more fun than me."

Plenty of teenagers agreed.

A snowboarder’s average age was 17.2 years when Reynolds took up the sport, and almost all boarders were male.

As a 50-year-old beginner, he had nowhere to hide.

"I used to get strange looks but there were also guys in their 30s coming over in the line and asking how it was going.

"They said they wanted to try it too.

"I remember pulling in at the bottom one day and talking to a fellow and his 10-year-old son.

"He (the son) was continually looking at the board and back at me.

"I said I’m pretty old to be on a board, eh?

"He said yeah, then asked me: ‘Mister do you take air?

"I told him at my age I was more likely to pass air.

"The rest of the line probably appreciated that more than him."

Good friend Tom Thomson encapsulates the group’s overriding attitude: "You’re only as young as you play, and we play young".

When the informal boarders group isn’t on the snow they’re mountain biking, hiking and in Ron Slack’s case kite surfing.

Thompson said a focus on healthy living was paying off.

On a powder day, the Greys most often lead "the kids" in gondola line-ups.

"We’ve got less need for sleep at this age, hardly any of us do alcohol, no cigarettes. There’s very few days we don’t answer the bell," says Thomson.

"When it comes down to it we probably have more unadulterated fun than kids. You try to maximize every day."

Thomson tried snowboarding nine years ago and hasn’t skied on the mountain since.

He wanted to be involved in his son’s sport of choice.

The then 53-year-old capitalized on a snowboarding program aimed at adults, booking in to a Dave Murray boarding camp where he first met Dale Reynolds and where the term "Greys on Trays" was coined.

Thomson said an old Warren Miller film had wet his appetite for snowboarding.

"I’d seen boarders having a lot of fun but this movie convinced me.

"It showed four skiers and one boarder at a time before powder skis and in the kind of snow where skiers back then were having trouble.

"The guy on the board kind of floated along; he seemed to have the best ride."

He believes boarders unwittingly saved the very industry that initially sought to keep them from the ski hills.

"It brought in the whole skate board generation at a time when numbers in skiing were bottoming out," he said.

"Boarding saved the hills and the whole ski industry – ski manufacturers learned from it and made a better ski so people who like the idea of big carving turns could get on a pair of skis.

"Both types of equipment have improved a lot."

So have the Greys on Trays.

Ron Stack clocked up his 65 th birthday while boarding on Whistler this month, almost two decades after taking up boarding, a move that was hastened by knee problems that developed from skiing.

He remembers kids on beginner runs laughing at his first attempts.

"There were no instructors then and hardly any edges on the boards. You just kind of slid around," he said.

No one’s laughing now – except maybe the "Peter Pan" Greys themselves.

They’re on the mountain most mornings, carving through the trees.

Both Thompson and Baker have bounced back from broken legs – Baker has seven screws in one after a clash with a tree that left him decidedly second best and Thompson careened down an embankment when a boarder collided with him just days later.

"I went into hospital as he (Baker) came out. It was January and it did us in for the rest of the year," he recounted.

"As soon as we were able we were back on the boards though.

"I guess it’s a passion for us. You’re always wanting to improve – right now I’m attempting to turn better and rounder and trying to get on an edge more, and there’s always competition between us. That doesn’t change with age."

That passion for boarding has earned several Greys sponsorship deals, from board manufacturer Prior and from Ripzone.

Whistler’s Greg Daniells, a Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors examiner, believes the likes of Reynolds, Stack, Baker and Thomson are instrumental to a boarding industry trying to grow bigger than its freewheeling teenager image.

Snowboarding’s rider age is creeping up, albeit slowly, and retailers are now also catering specifically to female boarders.

The average age of a snowboarder has jumped from 17 to 21 or 22, and Daniells estimates boarders now make up between 30 and 40 per cent of ski pass users in British Columbia.

He believes it’s just a matter of time before snowboarders equal skiers in numbers, pointing to the easier learning curve for snowboarding, the sport’s more comfortable soft boots, and its young at heart image as definite selling points across all different age groups.

"When boarding started it started a kind of revolution," Daniells said.

"Skier acceptance was a big thing for the sport because then there was more than powder for boarders and it started to open up the design of boards.

"Now there’s a significant amount of females in the sport and some older people too.

"I love both sports but I see boarding even outnumbering skiing eventually."

The industry appears split on that one – plenty of others disagree.

Recent Canadian Ski Council and Print Measurement Bureau statistics show skiing still has the jump on snowboarding across Canada with 1,588,000 people downhill skiing exclusively last season, compared to 766,000 snowboarders, and 843,000 others who enjoy both sports.

And while skier numbers had dropped marginally on previous years’ records, so too had snowboarder numbers.

A yet-to-be publicly released Canadian Ski Council survey of 30,000 people across 50 ski hills this season returned figures still heavily favouring skiers – 63 per cent of ski hill users were alpine skiers and 31 per cent were snowboarders. The next biggest user group was snow skaters at four per cent.

"There’s a lot of switching back and forth these days," Canadian Ski Council president Colin Chedore maintained.

"Up to three years ago snowboarding was at about 27 per cent so numbers are steadily increasing, but a lot of snowboarders were skiers and may go back to skiing as they grow older, and I’ve talked to a lot of snowboard industry people at a conference recently who say they enjoy both, which is different from your hardcore skiers who will never snowboard.

"The two sports have blended together a lot though."

Chedore said parabolic skis, introduced in the 1990s, had breathed new life into an old sport whose numbers were beginning to dwindle.

"Now skiers can go into the terrain parks; shorter skis have opened skiing up to more, made it more fun and more attractive to younger people, and even boarders began enjoying getting on skis once in a while," he said.

"That kind of swapping will happen more and more.

"And that’s probably the trend. I’m not sure the numbers (of skiers and snowboarders) will ever level out.

"I can’t see it in the next 10 years anyway.

"The youth market, especially for males, is heavily into snowboarding but it’s a long time before the Baby Boomers leave skiing and they’ve been the big market.

"We’d be guessing to forecast anything outside 10 years and you never know what else will come in.

"The biggest surprise of our most recent survey was to see snow skating had climbed to four per cent of ski hill users in Canada.

"The bottom line is as long as everyone’s having fun and enjoying an active life on the ski hills the industry’s healthy."



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