kind of interesting, but it makes me question why it matters at all?
i mean, basketball has changed image many times. as has skateboarding. But both basketball players and skateboarders still do what they like to do regardless of how their sport is viewed.
If skiing was as big as skateboarding, how would it affect you positively, or negatively? I'd still be out in the park in the cold trying to learn new tricks.
To be honest, about the only thing I could give two shits about is that I wish "extreme"/"alternative" sports in general would get the recognition they deserve. I quit baseball when I was 13 because there were like 4 or 5 coaches on the team, and their sons all happened to be the pitchers. The whole thing was a pain in the ass, there were favorites, and it stopped being fun. In skateboarding, snowboarding, skiing, whatever - you are as good as you make yourself, and the only pressure to get better comes from yourself.
Yet people are still obsessed with someone who catches a football and wants to make $100 million dollars a year, and now is currently taking off from training because his groin hurts a little. Yet you have people like Candide and JP Auclair and tons of others who get hurt pushing themselves and their sport to the limit, doing amazing things, and quietly working to come back - yet no one gives a shit.
I guess my point is that I don't care if skiing or snowboarding is used to sell mountain dew or not - what I do wish is that people's perspectives on sports would change in general. Alternative sports could provide a much more stress free, positive influence on people, not the negative, competitive stressful, materialistic environment that is mainstream sports.