word.
Might seem kinda far fetched until you think of how nuts his butters on and off (note the OFF portion of that thought) still seem. That's some way creative thinking in terms of rail-riding and like everyone's been saying, way ahead of its time.
IMO Tanner is on that kind of plan, and Frank Raymond is that dude in terms of urban as far as I'm concerned. The T-Walls and Henriks and Brogans and that whole Spotlight Project crew is nice with the tech shit, but that's just one part of skiing. I think you'll see it become more of a niche deal in our sport pretty soon here.
My biggest argument for that is that I've never seen an edit where they do tricks specific to the rail like Raymond, Vanular, Hall, and Heed do; it's always just a progression of spins on and off. Sick, but maybe not the real point of sliding rails. With guys like Raymond, you can definitely tell that they took some kind of aesthetic considerations when they chose what kind of trick to hit it up with. Check out Pollard in Stereotype - its the same mindset he brings to big mountain that we all praise him for, just on urbans.
This is Heed thing is a smaller part of the bigger argument we've been having for years about the 'spin to win' deal. Sometimes a switch lipslide is harder than 270 on (providing they're spinning the 'easy' way on that, don't get my point twisted here). My favorite rail trick this year was Clarke's sw on the hard way to pretzel out. That had only 360 degrees of total rotation but oozed with style and was tech as fuck. Heed can do that type of shit, and seems more cognizant of it. That's all I'm saying.
And I'm saying that I am STOKED that he signed with 9thward.