Sun Valley, Idaho – Somewhere around the time former Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee took over the turntables set up at the south end of the living room in Kipp Nelson’s Sun Valley mansion, the inaugural event of The Honda Ski Tour officially achieved its objective.
“We want to have the whole town look at the thing and say, ‘Wow, this is a happening,”‘ said Nelson, who, along with partner Steve Brown, launched the latest in a growing string of attempts to put the “cool” back in the sport of skiing last week in his hometown. “We want people to feel that if they weren’t here, they missed it.”
Billed as “the loudest show on snow,” The Honda Ski Tour (THST) might very well qualify as the biggest thing to happen in the sport of skiing since it was brought into the Winter X Games fold in 1998. And if the throngs of ravers gathered around the makeshift DJ booth at 2 a.m. on a Sunday are any indication, snow might be the least important among a long list of elements Nelson considers integral to the success of his four-stop, $5 million-plus tour.
The Sunday night soiree was the capper to a four-day bender the likes of which Sun Valley’s core town of Ketchum likely has never seen. Streets were closed for the first time in 25 years as Jamaican reggae legends The Wailers serenaded parka-clad concertgoers huddled around bonfires on a frigid Friday night. Fireworks exploded above flame-juggling street performers and head-spinning break dancers while Hollywood celebrities hobnobbed with local socialites in backstage VIP tents. Bars ballooned beyond capacity as the progressive sounds of DJ Logic, Kamphire Collective and Swollen Members trickled out into the night.
Oh, and somewhere in between, some quality skiing took place.
To fully appreciate THST, it’s important to understand Nelson, provider of its ultimate impetus. First and foremost, Nelson is a skier. A former three-discipline racer for the U.S. Ski Team’s current top dog, Bill Marolt, at the University of Colorado in the late-1970s, Nelson, 47, retired from a successful investment banking career shortly after his 40th birthday and spent a good portion of the past six years either climbing up mountains or skiing down.
When Marolt invited him to join the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s (USSA) board of directors two years ago, Nelson agreed, but with reservations.
“I saw it as a big problem that there wasn’t a single major ski event held on American soil anytime between Christmas and Easter, the months when there are the most American skiers on the slopes,” Nelson said. “If we want to expand our fan base, we had to do something about that.”
Four stops on tour
Ultimately, Nelson recognizes the half-truth of his statement. There is, in fact, one ski event held here in America that qualifies as “major,” and it kicks off Thursday in Aspen. But the Winter X Games aren’t sanctioned by USSA. And what’s more, they are a one-and-done annual event, incapable of creating the critical mass Nelson views as necessary to establish the type of fan base he believes new-school skiing can eventually achieve.
Still, as the model for winter action sports, the 11-year-old Winter X Games provide a heck of a start. Just look what they’ve done for snowboarding.
The difference, Nelson believes, is that snowboarding’s meteoric rise in the winter sports world has been bolstered by network televised events like the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix Series, the Vans Triple Crown and, most recently, the Winter Olympics. Outside of the X Games (and to a lesser degree, the U.S. Freeskiing Open), progressive events like ski halfpipe and skiercross weren’t getting any love.
“To me, the X Games is the Super Bowl. We’re just trying to be, for skiing, the regular season,” Nelson said. “The reason we started this is that I just lamented the fact that apart from the X Games, there is not much in terms of elite-level ski racing or freeride competition in the U.S. that is televised on network TV. Really, virtually nothing. It just wasn’t being done yet, so we decided to do it.”
Focused for now on skiing- specific superpipe and multiple- man “cross”-style downhill races, THST is pulling out all the stops with a $500,000 purse in its first season, a four-hour network television contract on ABC and remaining stops at Breckenridge (Feb. 1-4), Aspen (Feb. 22-25) and Squaw Valley, Calif. (March 8-11).
The music acts – including nationally renowned artists like Michael Franti in Breck – and festive, party atmosphere are the hooks to draw in an audience. Nelson is banking on the talent of skiers like X Games champions Simon Dumont and Casey Puckett to keep it.
“I think it’s a pretty cool movement that these guys are trying to put together,” said recently retired U.S. Ski Team racer Daron Rahlves, who took fourth in the Sun Valley skiercross. “It’s a crazy event and I like it.”
The concept isn’t new. It has been done on the summer side of the action sports equation for two years now with the Dew Tour, a multiple-stop “regular season” for skateboarders, BMX bikers and motocross freestylers on the X Games circuit. USSA has seen similar success with its Snowboard Grand Prix.
But the concept is new to skiing, or at least within those disciplines deemed most progressive among modern skiing enthusiasts.
Seeking unification
The underlying problem in the skiing world, Nelson believes, is a fragmented market comprised of various sects with little interest in one another. Racing – with its strict European traditions and rules – comprises one camp, and freeride – the current incarnation of freestyle that prides itself as the antithesis – is the other. Within those segments, however, fall the sub-sects of downhill, slalom, pipe, park, moguls, aerials, skiercross and so on. The challenge lies in unifying the various pieces of the pie.
Nelson believes that question was answered for him during last winter’s Turin Olympics, where television ratings for alpine skiing races were trounced by the darlings of the Games – snowboard halfpipe and four-person snowboardcross races. And the International Olympic Committee apparently agreed, recently adding skiercross racing to the 2010 Games’ schedule. Consensus among industry experts is that halfpipe skiing isn’t far behind.
“What we are trying to do by bringing those two elements together is attempt to represent as many skiers as we can. So we decided these two formats of competition – ski pipe and skiercross – will represent all ski racers, hopefully, and all freeriders, hopefully,” said Nelson, adding that THST is poised to become the qualifying tour for the U.S. Olympic Skiercross Team. “So part of it is to break down some of these idiotic notions that if you were a freeride guy you couldn’t respect somebody who is a racer and vice versa. Each is equally fundamental.”
And where does The “Ski” Tour stand on the sport of snowboarding? According to Nelson, next year’s version could also include snowboardcross events.
“We don’t want people to think that just because we’re ‘The Ski Tour’ that we don’t like snowboarding or that we don’t think it’s cool or we don’t think it’s legitimate. It’s more that there was more empty space in skiing than in snowboarding,” Nelson said. “I want people in skiing to respect all of it, to celebrate what everybody does, not to say, ‘I’m a this and not a that.’ There’s really no room for that.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
