Finland: Hot bed of Snowboarding but not Freeski. Why??

M

Matty_C

Active member
Somebody explain this to me: finland has produced some of the world's best snowboarders (Risto Matila, Antti Autti, Ero Etala etc) but i can't think of a single finnish freeskier... why?
 
Wait a few years. or maybe just a year or so.

Iisko "Lisko" Heiskanen was 2nd in Orage Europe Open pipe last year. Just behind Candice, Simon Dumond third...(so here you go). Btw. he goes big!

There are couple of others too. They're just probably too drunk (or just don't care) to compete and show up too much...:)

We have couple of pretty good alpinist/big mountain skiers too. But same applies here: they ski for themselves not fot the audience/media...as cliche as it sound. And are maybe too much into alpinist/extreme skiing compared to the commercial ski flick big mountain stuff (very different approach, I'd say)

But I guess there is some young guys coming soon to an international spotlight. Snowboarding's still very popular though...and the success of those said guys will make it even more popular all the time. Kids pretty much see snowboarding as a more appealin sport, I guess?

Our land is also pretty small market segment. Sponsoring is full business...so it's even harder for a young guy (or girl) from this kind of country to get international contacts/sponsors, even if he(or she) is super good. A skier/rider from a big country means more potential market for the company. Although in snowboarding our riders got some kind of head start and got big sponsors almost in the beginning of first freestyle snowboard craze, in the early 90's. So the Finns has been known since then in the "scene".

 
Ps. One other thing too...some people might even think newschool skiing as a "separate" sport but have you noticed almost all the new freestyle's biggest stars come from the countries which have strong (and old) ski culture: USA, France, Sweden, Canada, Austria (lately)...

I guess in snowboarding it was a bit easier for the countries like us to get success...cause all the participants pretty much started "from the same level", if you know what I mean?

Ok, here was my 2cents...maybe not all true but hopefully helped a bit?
 
yeah we got super talent here...Leinonen world champ in half pipe and hes only 16...two years ago the finns were killing jacob wester in the pipe at gamblers weekend...
 
and newschool is kind of just starting to settle here...for example last year one could buy armada skis from one store that i know of in finland...mainly the brands that stores carry are rossignol, salomon and k2...
 
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