The other day my friend Dina and I had a long conversation about the lack of female athlete representation in this year’s ski videos. She had attended several premieres in Aspen the first weekend in October at The Meeting, a ski and snowboard film festival hosted by the Aspen Skiing Company.
Dina grew up in Chamonix, France, and has been skiing since she could walk. She and her younger sister would be dressed and ready to go to the mountain at 6 a.m. with Christmas morning-like anticipation.
“We’d wake our mother up when it was still dark out and she’d say, ‘Girls, the lifts don’t open until 9!’ Finally, she bought us a bus pass so we’d just go early and sit at the mountain all morning instead of at home.”
Dina’s passion for skiing never waned. After completing her master’s degree in linguistics, she moved to Colorado to do post-graduate work in Boulder and eventually moved to Aspen. Like most of us, moving to Colorado for school was primarily a good excuse. What she really wanted was to live in the Rockies for the kind of powder that’s rarely found in the damper climate of the Alps.
Dina has continued her early-bird tradition well into her 20s, securing her place in line at the Aspen Mountain gondola long before the lift is running on frigid winter mornings. Dina is a telemark skier with a bouncy, peppy style. She can drop knee turn through anything from bullet-proof moguls to cliff lines and even pipe and park, her dark curly hair poking out from under her hat like it has somewhere to go.
At The Meeting, she was like a teenage groupie at a rock concert, beside herself to be elbow to elbow with so many pro skiers she’d always admired from a distance. “I met Seth Morrison,” she told me later, “and wanted to say, ‘Do you know you’ve been my hero for at least half of my life?”‘
But after the weekend was over, she found herself feeling strangely disappointed by the absence of female heroes, or at the very least, any representation of women whatsoever. She called me brimming with ideas for making a women’s ski video, and I had to bite my tongue not to discourage her. I did, however, fill her in on what has been a life- long battle for so many female athletes, particularly in action sports.
I told her the story of Allison Gannet, a freeskier from Crested Butte who nailed what I always believed to be the most impressive female segment in a ski video that appeared in “Harvest” by Teton Gravity Research back in 1998. Gannet had to fight to get the guys to work with her, so when she finally scored that coveted heli seat and the chance to ski for the cameras in the Chugach Range of Alaska, she wasn’t about to blow it.
They scouted out her descent and she communicated to the film crew via radio that she intended to straight run it and they didn’t believe her.
She dropped in and did just that, picking up incomprehensible speed and holding it together for a top-to-bottom straight run that is just as exciting as a big cliff drop or technical slough line. Audience response at the “Harvest” premiere mirrored the intensity of her performance, the screams and whistles growing louder and more intense as she shot down that face like a cannon.
The shot was also featured in “Empress,” an all-women action sports video that was produced by my friends Tiffany Jones and Sky Rondenet because they felt the same way Dina does. The film was a labor of love that put Jones and Rondenet into serious debt, though they were able to squeeze out one last video, “7 Girls,” before closing the doors on XX Productions. (Rondenet still shoots women’s surfing and has been involved in a wide variety of video projects.)
I explained to Dina that the problem isn’t with the athlete’s ability so much as the industry’s squandering of funds when it comes to supporting those athletes. The resources needed to fund and execute those productions are tremendous, and sponsors are pretty explicit about which athletes they want featured for the dollars they’re putting into it. What’s worse, the female pro skiers who get the lion’s share of sponsor dollars are the beautiful ones, because sex appeal is still more marketable than the girl who can ski.
I told Dina that at least for now, she is already capitalizing on the most productive way for female skiers to get visibility: out ripping it up on the hill.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
