There are some things that just go together. Like cheese and wine. Marks & Spencer. Ant and Dec even. But skiers and snowboarders, many would suggest, are not such a harmonious coupling. Ever since boarders began to encroach on the slopes in big numbers in the late 1980s (following a particularly impressive boarding sequence in the 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill), there has been an uneasy alliance between them and the more traditional downhill mountain adventurers.
On the one hand, skiers complain that snowboarders fail to observe the etiquette of the slopes and think they are the masters of the mountains. They grumble that they are frequently cut up, barged in front of in queues and “dissed” by members of the boarding fraternity. Boarders in turn moan that skiers are too timid and get in their way, clogging up the runs and generally spoiling their fun.
But are the new upstarts really all just adolescents with too much hardware hanging from their ears and a dubious taste in clothing? Do they and skiers have genuine reason to dislike and distrust one another? Or can they coexist happily?
William Winter, a senior rep for the Ski Club of Great Britain, observes: “The point is that there is a huge difference between the two. Boarders don’t just wear grungy clothes, with their crotches around their knees. There are also real problems with them. They tend to be younger, pushier and take more risks. I think they also have a tendency to go faster than they can control and they can be seriously thoughtless.”
Some of the problems can be put down to the different technology behind snowboarding. Boarders have a huge blind spot: they can’t see behind them and don’t have the same peripheral vision, meaning that if they don’t turn to see over their backs (and many don’t) a skier can quite innocently not be seen. They also take a different line down the hill, adopting straighter and longer, sweeping curves, which gather speed and mean that they don’t mix well with a skier who is traditionally zig zagging their way down. This leads to dramatic near-misses and skier complaints of being cut up. Boards also churn up the snow far more than skis, leaving serious ruts behind them.
“I’ve been taken out by a boarder, and too many skiers have stories like that,” comments Winter, while also emphasising that the Ski Club has snowboarding members as well as snowboarder reps (despite its name) so he is not professionally anti-boarding.
There are also other difficulties, or rather differences. When boarders aren’t moving, they tend to huddle in gangs, like basking seals, just under the brows of hills where they can’t be seen. In addition, they lie about, only a few feet away from the tops of lifts, causing chaos for people trying to dismount. Once again this is a technology thing: they have to reattach themselves to their boards before moving off, while skiers can take off instantly.
Dominik Buetikofer, a leading Swiss snowboarding instructor, springs to his fellow boarders’ defence. “You get idiots everywhere. But if everyone is looking after one another then it’s all sweet. Everyone is just doing a sport on the snow and it doesn’t matter what it is. If they respect the rules then it’s all OK – if you don’t have that respect then there can be trouble.”
These “rules” are laid down in the skiers’ and boarders’ joint highway code, as stipulated by the Fédération Internationale de Ski. This states that anyone lower down the hill and moving at a slower rate has right of way over everyone else. The only exception to this is when moving off, in which case individuals must look up the hill and time their start not to clash with someone descending. So both parties are, in fact, meant to abide by the same laws.
Robi Anthamatten, the general manager of the famous Hotel Dom and Popcorn Bar, cradle of the snowboarding industry in Saas Fee, Switzerland, and favoured hang-out of boarders, plays down any enmity between the two camps. “There used to be real rivalry. The success of boarding used to be because they could do what they wanted to. They could wear what they wanted, so they wore baggy clothes because skiers wore tight clothes and they could do jumps. Now the only difference is that they wear their pants a bit lower,” he says.
Perhaps it is inevitable that there are culture clashes between boarders and skiers. While traditional skiers tend to be a rather more conservative, mature bunch, getting excited at conquering a nasty red run or venturing a few yards off-piste, the whole lexicon of boarding is peppered with risk-taking, danger-seeking thrills and spills. Boarders talk of “doing tricks” such as “kickers”, “tabletops” and “720s” (two full-circle rotations); they relish “riding the half-pipe”, “getting air” and touching their board with different “grabs” (from the nose grab, at the front of the board, to the tail grab at the back). Most of these antics tend to be confined to the fun parks rather than the slopes themselves, but clearly these characters thrive on serious speed and freestyle tricks and on not a small bit of danger.
One recent study, conducted in New Zealand, bore this out, finding that boarders sustain notably more injuries than their skiing counterparts – partly because if they take a tumble they can’t put their leg out to break the fall, but also because they are far more reckless with their sport.
There is also a worrying new development in the shape of freestyle skiers, who threaten to introduce yet more peril on to the slopes for the traditional once-a-year hobby skier. They seem to be cut from similar cloth as the snowboarders, with the same culture and the same relish for dangerous living.
Anthamatten explains: “Freeskiers are like the new boarders, because it is no longer really cool to be boarding. A few years ago the new carving skis were invented to copy the boards, as boarders got such great side cuts and used to do great sweeps down the slopes. Now skis have wider tips and tails and can even go backwards, so freeskiers are now doing the same tricks and moving in the same way as the boarders.
So where will it all end? Carnage on the slopes? Yet more rivalry between the two camps? Or a warm, mutually forgiving love-in? , one of the most typical specimens of the boarding fraternity, complete with comedy nickname,
“We have good friendships with the skiers,” says Buetikofer. “We want the same thing – having fun on the slopes. I also have the same problem with some boarders as skiers – anyone who doesn’t care about people on the slopes. If people are selfish and don’t think about the others, it’s a problem.”
It’s a fair point. Perhaps skiers should bury their prejudices and boarders should slow down a little. What’s certain is that the two will have to carry on co-existing, if not living in perfect harmony, on the snow. Latest estimates suggest that the ratio of skiers to boarders will be 50/50 in a few years time, rather than the current 75/25.
