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Skiboarding the forbidden park: Episode II
Date: 09/03/05
By: Roussel
So I’m hoping most of you read part one of this, if you didn’t go read it now it’ll help you understand this next article.
At first I was trying to find ways to convince my home resort, St-Bruno to lift their ban of “snowblades” in their park. In my somewhat enraged state of mind I thought of petitions, vandalism, rebel skiboarder attacks. But alas, I found out that none of these would have much of an effect after I found out the true reason for the “snowblade” ban.
As most of you already know I’ve sent e-mails to St-Bruno with no reply but I was shocked when the operator the park actually posted in a thread I made on this subject on the D-Structure forums. His name is Jean Simon. After he posted I found out one of my friends knew him very well so I got hooked up with his MSN. I was slightly surprised to see he wasn’t prejuidice towards skiboarding, he even knew about the old glory days of skiboarding. He remembered Nicky Adams riding the park at St-Bruno. We talked about skiboarding for a bit and I found out the real reason for the skiboard ban in Bruno.
For the past few years now Bruno’s park has been, well, not very up to it’s old hype. Jean Simon contacted the mountain and volunteered to bring the park back to it’s old time prime. He wanted to make bigger kicks, tables, better rails. The higher-up’s at the resort said that this would cause more injuries among the “snowbladers” because statistically, they are the ones who get most injuries in the park, even if there where less of them. So a compromise was made and “snowblades” were banned from the enhanced park, in hopes to lower injuries. So now Bruno would have a bigger better park like in the good old days. Ironically, the good old days where when Nicky Adams and Serge Mahue where hitting the Bruno park with the Salomon skiboad team.
The reason why so many “snowbladers” were getting injured in my opinion is not because skiboards are not stable, not because they are non-releasable, but from lack of experience. What else can you expect when the large companies market skiboards to inexperienced lower-income families. This is where the money in skiboarding is, not in the experienced riders of the park. So basically it comes down to this, money. It’s about the bigger profit. Bruno gets mores contests, more advertising, more core riders to come in their park, and large companies sell to who will buy the most. Everyone is happy, except the minority.
Since skiboards are banned because the park is too big, what about a small park? Jean Simon told me they would build a small park and skiboards would probably be aloud. I’ve been riding this small park for a few weeks now, and I must say it’s horrible, they wanted to keep injuries low so they make the juimp impossible to clear or get any sort of speed for and decent air. They have one box which is decent, but is the only thing to jib.
So this is where we stand, again, I’ve been told by Jean Simon that 3 more resorts in my area, Tremblent, St-Sauvuer and Avila have all put bans on “snowblades” in their bigger parks. They have similar reason for their bans. One of my friends works at Avila and said an elderly man went into the park on snowblades and took one of the biggest jump and had a heart attack in mid air and died.
One resort, Bromont, has found another way to deal with the inexperienced “snowbladers”, they have simply stopped renting snowblades. Which of course is a good thing for the experienced riders because they get to ride the park, but also stops new people from trying our favorite sport of skiboarding, or at least “snowblading”.
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