Travis Rice glances at the cover of the magazine across the table and sighs.
“That’s obnoxious,” he says, reading the Snowboarder Magazine cover titled “Will There Ever Be Another Travis Rice?”
On snow since he was 2, the son of a Jackson, Wyo., ski patroller climbed up the ranks of freestyle competition for several years as a teenager and then brought that spinning, airborne prowess to the backcountry and big mountains. Today, Rice is at the top of his game. The best in the world.
And on the heels of a two-year movie project, Rice is scheming to keep his throne. Three years ago he dreamed up a one-of-a-kind competition called “Natural Selection.”
The weeklong competition merged snowboarding’s best athletes from its two distinct camps: the park riders and the backcountry, big-mountain riders. Of the 17 invited riders competing at Jackson Hole ski area for $75,000 in a variety of big mountain slopestyle and freestyle events, Rice was tapped the winner.
This summer, the innovative athlete worked for months with a team of lumberjacks to hand clear a 2,200-vertical-foot, 45-degree slope at British Columbia’s Baldface Lodge ski area, building more than 100 man-made features. In February, the slope will host Rice’s “The Supernatural,” an extension of his “Natural Selection” comp.
The top of the slope will demand big-mountain line selection skills on steep terrain. The middle third will feature big kickers for monster airs. And the apron will have invited riders hitting log jibs and lower-angle freestyle features.
“All your skills will be boiled down into one run,” Rice said. “It will flatten the playing field.”
The event again will merge snowboarding’s perpetually separated camps. Up-and-coming innovative park riders and soulful, movie-star big-mountain riders will have to develop each other’s skills.
“Those two circles don’t really bump into each other that often,” Rice said. “This will change that.”
“The Supernatural” will give snowboarders an opportunity to grow backcountry and powder skills at a time when many easily could be swayed to follow the hard-packed Olympic park-riding path. With slopestyle to debut at 2014 Sochi Games, that route is becoming increasingly popular.
That worries Rice — especially since the International Ski Federation (FIS) is grooming the next generation of snowboarders with Olympic qualification competitions.
“I would love to see it out of the FIS’s hands,” Rice said.
