As a special closer to the first season of Powder & Rails, VBS is presenting FLF Films’ legendary “Snowboarders in Exile” in its entirety. “Exile” changed the course of snowboarding for the better. It was the inspiration for moving away from ski-based styles like slalom racing and helped infuse a more free form skate mentality into snowboarding. Upon the release of “Exile”, FLF created the concept of the snowboard video pro and changed the careers of its stars almost instantly. In the following years, FLF went on to release a few of the best videos ever made and launched the video production careers of legends like Dave Seoane, Standard Films, and Mack Dawg Productions.
Enjoy this one over the week-end!
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In the late 80s, a bunch of skaters who were bored in the wintertime inadvertently made snowboarding what it is today. They filmed each other not with any sort of historic legacy in mind, but just because that’s what you do when you’re a bunch of dudes who ride around on a piece of fiberglass in the snow all day. Then people saw these videos and started to realize the potential for tricks and big air on a snowboard, and everything else took off from there.
For whatever reason, most snowboarders have never embraced their forerunners with the same enthusiasm as skaters and surfers. That’s why I decided to make this show—as a way of giving credit to the people who took snowboarding from a fringe hobby to something people get paid stupid amounts of money to do. Or at least that’ll be the first few episodes. We’ll see where it goes from there.
Don’t miss theses webepisodes on VBS.tv.
Click below for a taste of what to expect.
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If it wasn’t for that damn sponsor that pulled out of the organization, we would all be in Munich - or looking in that direction - today for the 16th Air & Style!
The Air & Style truly is a legendary event as it marked the beginning of both big air and city contests. The event was created by Andrew Hourmont, a snowboard photographer, who just had the good idea to organise a contest in the Bergisel stadium in Innsbruck and was completly stoked when la creme de la creme of the snowboard scene showed up along 5000 spectators! Reto Lamm won the first edition - he was pulling iguanas and won with a..frontflip, while Palmer was doing huge one footers - of an event which has grown into THE major season opening contest of the TTR.
Ingemar Backman, Terje, Jim Rippey, Gimpl, White, Rice, Pearce all got their names next to Reto’s. Not only did the event location change from Innsbruck to Seefeld and finally Munich, but the format also evolved year after year from big air to sort of slopestyle, just to stick better to the evolution of our sport. And the Air & Style really is a true mirror to snowboarding’s progression from Reto’s front flip to Kevin’s Cab 1260 melon to crail air!!
Really sad that the event is cancelled this year but stoked for the coming Billabong Air & Style Quarter pipe event back in the Innsbruck mecca in February.
Check out this video showcasing Air & Style from 1993 till 1999. Wipe away that tear Bro…
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Defining moments of our sports. That’s what we will focus on in this new section dubbed BrOADER[roots].
In this hectic world we live in, it’s always good to take some time to reflect and look back at the people, products, brands, events that helped built our sport the way it is today. Hey we might sound kind of old school with this but for all the people who started riding in the early days you cannot imagine how sick the feeling was. Today the sport has grown a lot and the younger generation is breaking new grounds. But it would never happen without all these special moments!
We start the BrOADER[roots] trivia with the most famous trick of all times and definitly the most defining moment on my agenda: Ingo’s backside air in Riksgransen! This happened in May of 1996 and Ingemar earned over 10 covers with it. It also became the opening shot in Mack Dawgs movie Stomping Grounds.
Look at the set up: sketching run in, Ingo olliing a rock and going full speed, sort of OK booter, but pretty fucked up landing. Nevertheless Ingo went 7.5m high and stumped it clean.
The interesting story behind this epic moment is not only Ingo’s trick and all the quarter pipe events it lead to in the following years with the objective to fly higher. The sequence was shot by Pierre Wikberg and as he puts it, it’s that trick that got him into the snowboard filming industry for which a few years later he delivered some of the best videos of all time: Afterbang, Lame and Afterlame from Robotfood….to be continued.
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