What Ever Happened to the “Free” in Freestyle?

February 2002
What Ever Happened to the
“Free” in Freestyle?
Jonny Moseley sets out to turn
the Olympic bump competition
upside down
Exposed
The other side of Sun Valley
Baring it All
Kristen Ulmer ponders her
next extreme move
Contents
Departments
Skiing Scene
February 2002
Volume 54 Number 6
Health and Fitness
98 Save Your Hide
24 Power Surge
A determined U.S. Disabled
Team looks toward March.
Springtime conditions conspire
against you and your skin.
Fight back.
28 Face Shot
Ask Josh
108 How damaging are rail
Chad Fleischer: mind
games master.
slides to skis? What is the origin
of the word “ski”? Does the data
in the Gear Guide apply to
Midwestern skiers?
30 Fresh Tracks
Jamming with the Jackmormons.
Sluff
Over the Top
4
16
18
22
34 Sex Sells
When it comes to elite women
skiers, what’s wrong with a
little nakedness?
By Kristen Ulmer
40 Flying Lessons
By Barbara Sanders and AJ Kitt
The Source:
Features
Outfitter
Competition
90 Crystal Clear
Is the Northwest’s baddest ski
area selling out?
Back Talk
Braving avalanches, storms, altitude, and falling rock, not to
mention manical cab rides, four
audacious women set out to
climb and ski an unskied
Himalayan peak.
By Alison Gannett
By Eric and Rob Deslauriers
Traveler
Contributors
42 Indian Winter
38 Cliff Notes
Six skiers get personal about
their favorite long underwear.
First Tracks
Girls on Snow
Private Lessons
86 Dear John Letters
Up Front
72 What Ever Happened
to the “Free” in
Freestyle?
Jonny Moseley sets out to turn
the Olympic bump competition
upside down.
By Susan Reifer
92 Lodging, Priced
to Move
Destination
Ski hostels: convenient, cheap,
and often just plain classy.
The real Sun Valley is somewhere between the resort’s Old
World glamour and the town’s
hard-living locals’ scene.
By Bevin Wallace
78 Split Personality
52 Raising the Bars
Get carried away on a bacchanalian riptide of springtime revelry
with a harem of Breckenridge
party girls, and you might decide
that skiing’s the easy part.
By Peter Oliver
60 I Candy
Ladies First: These five
photos redefine the concept of
magazine centerfold.
66 Chick Magnet
For many top women freeskiers,
Crested Butte, with its extreme
terrain and close-knit community
is a major attraction.
By Stephen Gorman
SKIING • FEBRUARY 2002
9
Catching air has been part of skiing since the 1700s.
Back then, Norwegian skiers competed for cash prizes on
a course that included cliff drops and man made kickers.
In the early 1950s Stein Eriksen popularized ski acrobatics when he started throwing front and back flips during
Sunday-afternoon shows at Sun Valley. Soon pro-tour
organizers began insisting that gate racing champions perform similar stunts before slalom races to draw crowds.
By the early ’60s, freestyle skiing, then called “fancy
skiing” or “exotic skiing”, was well on its way.
he knows why. “Freestyle mogul skiing and aerials are not
‘freestyle’ in the true sense of the word,” says McConkey.
“What they’re doing is perfecting a very specific aspect of
skiing in a very specific, structured format. Young skiers
have a need for creative, progressive things. No one wants
to do a twister spread or a daffy twister cossack. Every
young kid wants to go into the terrain park.”
And that’s where the money is. “The top guys are getting six figures,” says McConkey, referring to the leading
kingpins of jib. “I guarantee you that those World Cup
mogul skiers aren't making
that kind of money. Nobody
knows who any of them are,
either. Except Jonny.”
As a result, many athletes, and sponsors, and fans, have turned completely
away from freestyle in favor of new school. Moseley himself bowed out of the World Cup for two reasons to compete in big air and slopestyle events. Now he’s choosing
instead to use his position to push the envelope inside the
world of competitive freestyle.
Whether or not Jonny gets to butter up his dinner roll
at the Salt Lake Games remains to be seen. Other mogul
competitors will likely object to it, claiming the move is
inverted. Even if the trick withstands protests, the consequences are high. Throwing a dinner roll off a big kicker
is one thing; landing it in the middle of a mogul field is
another thing entirely.
Moseley insists his piping-hot maneuver
is not a flip.
Jonny Moseley sets out to turn the Olympic bump
competition upside down.
By Susan Reifer
J
onny Moseley unveiled his new trick, the dinner
roll, back at the summer X Games in 1998 in San
Francisco but he’s been working singularly hard
to perfect it ever since. It’s a case where precision is vital.
To the untrained eye, the dinner roll looks a lot like a
rodeo: a spinning, off-axis flip with a grab. But Moseley
insists his piping-hot maneuver is technically not a flip
because his feet never actually go over his head. And this
is an important distinction.
Since the 1970s
inverted maneuvers have been forbidden in freestyle
mogul competition.
To prove the move was legit, the ‘98 gold medalist
threw a dozen dinner rolls on camera at Squaw Valley last
spring. The footage was shipped to the 12 voting members
of the International Federation of Skiing (FIS). As the
governing body of World Cup skiing, FIS has the final
72 SKIING • FEBRUARY 2002
9
word on what is allowed and not allowed in World Cup and
Olympic competition. Initially other teams gave Moseley’s
move the thumbs down. “Jonny is one of the few athletes
who has the ability to do this kind of jump, so most everyone is opposed to it, they are very threatened by it,”
explains Cooper Schell, Moseley’s personal coach and
manager. “But the rules clearly state that if the trick falls
into the criteria, then it has to be allowed,” he says. In the
end, the FIS agreed with Moseley: His feet might look like
they go over his head, but they do not. In other words, his
new trick does not classify as an invert. Jonny’s dinner
roll is fair game.
Moseley’s quest is only one of many attempts to bridge
the growing gap between new school and World Cup
freestyle. In fact, freestyle skiing, including moguls, aerials, and new school, is such a simmering stew pot of conflicts that Jonny’s dinner roll looks like a simple side dish.
Hotdogging was progressive, expressive, and all things
liberal. It was the antidote to skiing's conservative and
technique obsessed status quo. Like new school jibbing,
it put more emphasis on flair and inventiveness than on
precision. “The attitudes the original freestylers had are
the same as the freeskiing attitudes now, “ says seminal
ski filmmaker Greg Stump. “Party. Have a good time. Go
for it. Reinvent skiing.”
But maintaining such a freewheeling attitude isn’t
easy. By the early ‘70s, corporate sponsors like Chevrolet
were backing competitive mogul, aerial, and ballet events.
Then in the winter of 1972-73, two hotdoggers, Peter
Herschorn and Scott Magrino, were permanently paralyzed from injuries suffered wile attempting double back
flips. Chevrolet banned inverts during its events, as did a
host of ski areas. In the wake of the injuries, competitors
organized into associations, set up safety rules, and standardized jumps and judging. Eventually, infighting took
its toll, and the pro circuit collapsed. In 1979, professional freestyle athletes agreed to regroup under the auspices of FIS in the hope that it would keep their
sport alive.
The FIS moved hotdogging in a much cleaner direction, says Canadian John Smart, a former Olympic mogul
skier. “Freestyle became more disciplined.” Smart says
this turned mogul skiing into the “Ferrari” it is today, specialized, high speed, high performance, but he admits this
came at a cost. We could have been doing flips in the
bumps years ago. We're were held back by the bureaucracy of FIS.” Athletes have been lobbying for progressive
change for years, says Smart, but the FIS only began to reevaluate its hard line stance when faced with new school’s
popularity boom. “They’re second-guessing themselves
now,” he says. “They’re asking, ‘How come we’re not taking off at this same acceleration rate? Why are all our athletes jumping into new school?’”
Shane McConkey, founder and president of the
International Free Skiers Association (IFSA), which sanctions new school events like big air and slopestyle, thinks
Continued on Page 96
No one’s likely to confuse
the old school spread eagle
with an inverted maneuver.
SKIING • FEBRUARY 2002
73