Snowboarding: Not A Sport For The Unfashionable

The Baron, an avid birdwatcher, spots a rare ice tit flitting back and forward amongst the snow.

Snowboarding has always seemed a little less snobbish than skiing, maybe because it's 'younger'. While snowboarders may still drive about the city with their board racks still attached to the roof in the middle of the week just to show everyone what they can afford to do on the weekend, just like skiers do, snowboarding sells itself by advertising its roots in the earthy, DIY spirit of surfing and skating.

Snowboarding is winter sport's beach cricket rather than its polo. But just like every other sport that's played in front of an audience (excepting golf and cricket), snowboarding has been hijacked by the image nazis and turned into a fashion parade. The rebellious, non-conformist youngsters who eagerly conform by spending big to look the same, just as their poloneck sweater ski-loving parents do every time they trade up to the latest model BMW -- the perfect prop for the mid-week Thurl roof rack.

But of course, snowboarders are free spirits who care not for the trappings of The Man's capitalist society and its imperative to turn everything pure and good into a dollar; no, they're a wandering tribe whose sole destiny in life is to track down and ride the Greatest Wave of All.

Sorry, wrong room. I was thinking of Endless Summer. I should admit now that I can't snowboard, and it's made me bitter about the whole affair. Also, failing at snowboarding cost me more than $200. Failing at surfing and skating didn't cost me a cent.

Perhaps if I had managed to 'snowboard' all the way down the hill the first time, I too would have taken out a loan and bought all the trendy clothes one apparently needs to be accepted on the slopes. But I didn't, so fuck snowboarding.

Instead, to my impoverished bretheren, I present to you a wonderful alternative which is so fresh, you can do it yourself, right now, no dress code required, no hidden charges so stigma attached. I call it ARSE BOARDING.

Failing in spectacular form before a bunch of daggily-dressed, forgiving nerds is far easier than doing the same thing in front of several hundred of the world's most fashionable country's most fashionable kids.

On my maiden voyage down the slopes, I was wearing hand-me-down snow clothes rustled up at the last minute -- what appeared to be fisherman's waders made for a five-foot-high person so the cuffs flapped attractively a few inches above my snow boots, a ‘waterproof’ K-Mart jacket that was sopping from embarassment at being in the mere presence of snow, and a pair of $10 service station sunglasses specially designed to filter out any harmful dress sense and allow all the power of the sun's UV rays to be concentrated by the lenses and shot laser-style into my retinas.

And so, I came to my first ride. I found myself being hustled by the crowd to the lip of a steep precipice, fumbling to strap my right foot into the binding. In the interests of consistency, my borrowed shoes were three sizes too small and as I painfully hobbled claw-toed to the gut-tightening ravine, there was a rush of anxiety. Good, I thought, this will sharpen me up for that 360-degree double-air jump I plan to execute straight after take-off. I'll show these snobs that a bad pair of pants and cheap sunglasses doesn't mean I'm a fucking amateur.

It took me over an hour to reach the bottom of the slope.

It took, as I say, about an hour, and even then I didn't make it to the relative anonymity of the crowd lining up for the chairlifts. Meanwhile, as I lay face-first in the salty white powder, or experienced one of my experimental four-metre flights down the hill, scores of snowboarders were swooping about me like a flock of angry magpies harassing a school kid on a bike.

Brazen, confident, elegant magpies that pretended not to look, but sought me out for a spraying anyway.

Once, I got up for more than 10 seconds and the board made a pleasing hissing sound as it gathered speed, and I bent my knees and tried to look like I was searching for the right snow mound to get some sick air. Instead of simply trying to keep it together enough to smash into the plastic fence on the edge of the mountain.

I was bracing myself for this probability when the snowboard slowed, paused sickeningly, and accelerated backwards from the safety of the verge and back onto the superhighway, straight into the oncoming traffic I'd just escaped. I crashed into the snow, again, laughing with the cracked, high-pitched laugh of someone flirting dangerously close to hysteria.

Finally my body couldn't take it any more. It became difficult to stand up. A small child sped past me on her trainer skis and gave me a smug little smile as she swooshed past, showering me with powder. Grinding my teeth to shards, I clumsily detached my feet from the bindings, and faced the final 100m poo-panted walk of shame down the slope in front of the entire Sunday fashion crowd. There must have been thousands of them.

I decided to fake a broken leg, and pretend I was gamely dragging myself to the medics, excusing me from a dramatic entrance over the line. But the snow was so deep on the edge of the field my leg-dragging theatrics were lost on everyone, so I thought, fuck it.

I'm gonna ride this bastard, even if I have to sit down like a man taking a piss.

And thus, my children, Arse Boarding was born. It was fun. I flew down the gentle incline, using my heels as brakes and the binding as a handgrip, feeling every bit the man in the three-wheel car. With my dignity now gone entirely, I had nothing left to lose except my health, so I headed to the very top of the mountain in a gondola.

It was K2. This bastard was the best a $50 lift-ticket could deliver, and I planned to take all 5000m of it on the arse.

At the top, I relaxed and brazened it out. It was worth the money just to see the looks on the faces as I wandered casually to the edge and sat down, as if to make a last-minute adjustment to the ratchet strap on the board -- then mounted up, waved a cheery good morning to all and sundry and disappeared over the lip, riding pedal-car style.

In fact, I snuck guiltily to the fathest edge with the gentlest incline and sort of shunted myself away like a dog dragging its arse on the carpet, but fuck you, this is my story and I'm sticking to it until Oprah finds out the truth. K2. Danger. Slope. Arse.

This time, my journey to the lowlands proved a lot of fun, in the sense that going for a brisk walk in the park is fun when you could be home watching the Sunday football on TV. 

I figured that if the fuckers were going to stare at the retarded foreigner any way I rode, I might as well give them something special to look at.

I went backwards down the hill at shocking speeds, I nearly coathangered a young girl and her Canadian skiing instructor (the kind your partner had an affair with and never told you about); I lost my board in a collision and had it chased down and rescued by a man on a snowboard who imitated a skydiver doing a pin-drop free-fall to capture the falling man without a 'chute; I hit a pine tree and had a brief chat with a group of fashionables from Tokyo while doing 60kmh in reverse.

In a word, I was, yes, a bit of a cock. But the idea of spending nearly $300 to get to the snowfields and back, all told, and getting 2hrs sleep in 24hrs just for a bunch of injuries and a good view was too much to take. If I lay on the ground to begin with, then surely the chance of hospitalising injury would be reduced, and thus the fun increased. I didn't even really need a board. I could have just sort of tipped myself off the summit and rolled downhill.

Despite the comparable safety of Arse Boarding, I sprained every muscle in my body, even some not yet discovered by medical science. Piloting a shopping trolley down the centre of the steepest part of Punt Rd in peak hour would be a walk in the park for me after experiencing that descent.

Now that most of the heat of shame from the day has died from my face, leaving only sunburn, I feel I showed those coolsies a trick or two about their sport. Isn't it supposed to be all about cutting your own style?