Pretty Good for a Girl by Tina Basich

Author:Tina Basich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-03-17T05:00:00+00:00

Backside 360 in the backcountry of Utah.

Copyright © Kevin Zacher

CHAPTER 10

THE BIRTH OF FREERIDING

Now that there were more established female athletes, representing in contests, doing good things for good causes, we started to look at what else we really wanted to gain from snowboarding. For me, that answer came on one of the European World Cup tour events the season of that first Boarding for Breast Cancer. Shannon, my brother, and I traveled to a competition in this small village in Italy that was hosting the World Championships. The mountain runs were a total of 700 vertical feet, which is considered very short and small by any standards. There wasn’t even enough pitch in the mountain for the racers to get real speed to make a decent turn in the Giant Slalom course. The halfpipe was made up with what little snow they had left and was fenced in so the cows wouldn’t walk onto the course. And this course was going to determine the World Champion! Whatever. We weren’t the only ones who were bummed. All sorts of pros turned up and were disappointed at the conditions and the location that was chosen by the tour. I looked at the poor condition of the halfpipe and wondered how the weather was in Utah—they probably had fresh powder. Competing on the World Cup was so unglamorous sometimes. Shannon and I knew there was so much more to snowboarding than just competing, like freeriding down a big mountain with fresh powder on it.

We decided to finish up the trip with a freeriding day in Cortina, Italy, which was only an hour away. Cortina has huge mountains and it’s where the James Bond movies are filmed because of its scenery. Shannon and I took the gondola up to the very top. We scouted out a run that was untracked powder. We had to traverse on our boards around this cliff range to get to it. We kept going around the mountain and at one point I looked up and thought, “Oh my God!” I told Shannon to stop and look up. We couldn’t believe the mountain and this cliff we were standing under—it was about 600 feet above us and we were right underneath it so the view was breathtaking. Down below looked like the perfect run. Wide, open, diamonds of powder. We thought, let’s do this run together—we’ll do doubles instead of going down one at a time. We dropped in and it was one of the most memorable runs of my life. Fresh powder turns that were perfect, snow flying in plumes with each turn, and we were yelling to each other the whole way down. At the bottom, we high-fived and hugged each other and were crying. We were so wrapped up in this feeling of a powder day in a beautiful place with friends. It was incredibly emotional.

After that experience, it was hard for me to go back on the World Cup because it had changed my views on contests.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.