I wrote this essay for an online class 2 weeks ago
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One VS. Two
In the Alpine world there are two
kinds of people, people on one board and people on two. The former are known as snowboarders
while the latter as skiers. Skiers
and Snowboarders often fight over which sport is truly superior. The concepts of
mobility, edge pressure, and grabs make skiing much more interesting than
snowboarding.
The
first topic we will discuss is that of mobility. In Snowboarding, unlike its counterpart, skateboarding both
your feet are attached to the board.
So if the need were to arise where you needed to move anywhere and there
was no downward slope present, you would be effectively stuck. You would have to take your foot out of
your binding and push while skiers passed you pushing with their poles and
skating with their skis. This
predicament is most troublesome when going into the backcountry. For skis there are things such as
Randonee bindings. These allow you
to pick up the back of your foot to walk with skis. The benefits of such bindings are increase when combined
with skins, these go on the bottom of your skis to allow you to walk
uphill. Neither of these exists
for a snowboard because walking while strapped into a snowboard is impossible. Snowboarders are effectively crippled
by deep snow or uphill slopes. Skiers
are free to roam where they wish.
One
basic purpose of the snowboard is to hit rails. However in recent years skiers have overtaken snowboarding
on rails with the concept of edge pressure. Edge pressure is the term used to
describe the use of ones skis to change the direction of rotational
momentum. Basically, change the
way you are spinning. For example,
if on a snowboard you do a 270-degree rotation spinning clockwise on to a rail,
your option is to do another clockwise spin off the rail. But on skis, by gripping the side of
the rail with an edge of one ski you can stop or even reverse your
rotation. This more than double
the amount of possible rail tricks.
This explosion of rail tricks in skiing is not matched in
snowboarding.
My
final point focuses on jumps. An
essential part of any trick is the grab.
This is where you grab your board or ski with one or two hands. In snowboarding you are limited as to
the number of grabs possible by the inability to separate your feet. You have two tips of the board and two
sides. So there are various
combinations of grabs with 2 hands and 4 sides of the board. But on skis there are 4 tips and 4
sides. Therefore the combinations
are much greater. In addition to
the fact that many grabs look different when the legs are moved in certain
ways, allowing for more personalized tricks and styles than in
snowboarding.
The
snowboard vs. ski debate will most likely go on forever. Skiing as superior due to edge
pressure, greater mobility, and a greater number of grabs. But to resolve the argument one must
look at the basic purpose of snow sports.
And that purpose is to have fun.
So what you ride on really doesn’t matter as long as you are achieving
that purpose. So stop fighting and
go have fun.
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