I’ve been sitting on this for a few days now, not wanting to go on about Kevin Pearce’s accident. The fact of the matter is the kid is good. He’s really good. He fell and got wrecked bad. That sucks, and I’m wishing him and his family the best in this time and I hope he makes a full recovery.

But now this is when the rest of the world starts to chime in on our game. It’s starting to sound a lot like 20 years ago when snowboarders were too wild and dangerous to be in public.

Dig this ABC news piece on KP and the extremity of extreme sports. The first half is a legit piece. Halfpipe riding is ridiculous these days. I remember when Trannyworld was hyping Stevie Alters for going 10ft out, and their measure of 10ft was questionable. Even Pat Bridges (what up, Pat!) makes an appearance and says it was a matter of “when not if”  this was going to happen. That’s because, as anyone who rides a snowboard knows, you fall all the time. All you can really hope is that you ride away from the next kicker, handrail or halfpipe. People even get knocked out on open slopes. Unfortunately for KP, he got the rotten egg. I’d think anyone can understand that.

Risky Maneuver Lands Snowboarder in a Coma
(At this point I need to thank anyone who clicked on that link and watched the clip. ABC news you suck, Disney sucks, and you need to make that shit Embeddable. Tom Brokaw 4 Life!)

EDIT big thanks to Brooke at Yobeat for scratching up some embed code!

Then we have Fat-mouth come in on the second half blaming everyone else for this happening. She blames the “Eurocentric IOC” (because they didn’t give the Olympics to Chicago, but  rather that Euro-Megalopolis, Rio de Janeiro) and wants them to send out medical examiners.

What are they going to tell us? KP is like a machine, and unfortunately he got caught up. I mean he fell probably 15 ft, face first, onto ice. And he was still heeling from an earlier concussion. Great. Thanks. What they need to do is bring in someone to be like “Whoa, Homey over-rotated which leads me to believe shit is going to get bigger and faster in coming years.”

He fell. It sucks. We want to see him back out there. And we all want to see Mike Schwarz back out there as well. this is inherent to snowboarding.

Then Fat-mouth keeps running on about how it’s snowboarders fault for trying to out extreme each other. It’s called simple competition. AND Fat-mouth, it was you and your shitbagged mainstream media that tagged it as “Extreme.” Disney owns ABC and ESPN who gave us the wonderful “X-Games” moniker. The media has done more damage to snowboarding than competition ever has.

Now here comes the kicker: I think I want people like her out front, running her Fat-mouth, talking about how bad-ass snowboarding is. Shit, she would flip her lid if she could wrap her mind around fashion smoking. Snowboarding has pretty much taken two routes: Pipe-Jock-Olympic path, or the  fucking-off-with-friends route. The pipe-jocks are what you get on tv. They are the family friendly snowboarding. Sean Blanco is the epitome of pipe-jock. Then there is the rest of us out there fucking off with out friends. We’re stoked because really snowboarding is what we know and it makes us happy. Doing shit that doesn’t get judged. Some are even able to make money off it.

There was a reason Terje boycotted the olympics in 1998. It had nothing to do with fear of head trauma. It was saying “Fuck you” to anyone who was trying to make our sport something that it wasn’t. Fuck you for putting us under the “guidance” of the FIS. And if you were going to spend 3.9 years ignoring or dumping on snowboarding, there was no reason he should get up and absolutely blow your mind for 3 minutes. The general public is not ready, and doesn’t deserve to be given anything back from snowboarders, skaters, surfers, etc.