Your personal playground in the snow
It’s good to be king of snowboarding. One of Shaun White’s sponsors created a private playground for him near Silverton, Colorado, and dubbed it the Red Bull Project X.
The web site for the project has a number of videos, including those of four breakthrough tricks that White worked on in the built-for-him halfpipe. For those who understand the lingo, they were 1) a front double cork ten, 2) a switch back 900, 3) a double back rodeo, and 4) a cab double cork ten. No, I don’t quite get them all, but at an abstract level I know that there’s a lot of skill and athletic ability at work.
While I watched the videos of the tricks, I found some of the other videos more interesting, or at least easier to grasp. In something that borrows from cable TV shows “Mythbusters” and “Ice Road,” a crew in the Lake Tahoe region built an 8,000 metal container (think of an oversized Dumpster). They transported it to Colorado, and used two pieces of heavy equipment and skids to move it next to the end of the halfpipe. They filled the container with foam blocks, giving White a safe landing zone as he practiced different tricks. As I said, it’s good to be king.
Perhaps the most interesting video described the building of the pipe. For day after day, they set off avalanches, which caused a sufficient amount of snow to accumulate in one spot. Then they used a pipe cutter to shape the snow.
You may wonder why Shaun White deserves all this attention and the money spent on his behalf. If you remember your Econ 101, there’s a three-word answer: “supply and demand.”
Millions of people want to see highly skilled snowboarders strut their stuff. That’s “demand.” Only a few, including White, can perform at the highest level. That’s “supply.” When you’ve got many people with a demand and only a few who can supply the demand, those who can supply will clean up financially and in other ways. Often in sports (and this is the case with White), the payment doesn’t come directly from fans, but from advertisers who want to reach those fans.
One of the videos showed White in street clothing, with an open shirt and his famous locks draped around his neck. He could remind you of any number of other entertainers. “Hair metal bands” from the 1970s and 1980s come to mind. So too does someone who was popular when snowboarding wasn’t even born, David Cassidy, aka “Keith Partridge.” Enjoy the video below.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJYSu2OVCGM]