There’s something deeply cool about strapping your feet to a plank and hurling yourself down an improbably steep slope. Those graceful, arcing turns; The effortless power… Big trousers, sunglasses, punk. Every aspect says “Hey brother, you’re flowing”.
It was roughly this thinking (plus some vodka and some left-over holiday time) that found me sitting at the side of a nice gentle run in Tignes. Les Alpes, mes oui, mange toute. An innocent-looking nursery slope harbouring the dark desire to inflict terrible damage to my twenty-something pride. Hey, all the kids are doing it! Both my little brothers snowboard. Half my friends do too. How hard can it be?
The hire shop summoned a re-run of the surf-shop scene from Point Break: “Hey, man, guys your age learning to surf, it’s cool, there’s nothing wrong with it.” “I’m twenty-five.” “See that’s what I’m saying, it’s never too late.” I’m given two enormous, rather scaberous-looking, boots and a shiny new board. I’d look pretty damned cool if it wasn’t for the giant hire-sticker shouting BEGINNER at anyone who glances at the nose of the board. Still, who’s gonna see it as I cruise by at 30mph?
Back on the slope everything’s looking swell. I get the boots clipped into the bindings on the third or fourth attempt… The sign of a natural. Sadly, that’s where things start to fall apart. And fall over. Standing up turns out to be a surprisingly troublesome adventure and the first few attempts find me back on my behind with a bump. The following few tries transport me several metres downhill against my will before depositing me back onto the ice. Fortunately for my pride, my two friends and fellow apprentice snow-surfers are having the same trouble. All three of us stand up. One falls down. The other two piss themselves laughing and go over too.
Things progress along these lines for the best part of three days. We have lessons in the afternoons with a slick French instructor called Nicolas. Pronounced Nicola. Naturally. “Bend your knees and lean. Watch me. Oui? Allez!” Bang, crash, wallop. Meanwhile, 6-year-olds cruise by wearing little yellow crash helmets and obvious amazement that anyone could be making such a meal of the trivial act of traversing a snow-covered slope. Surely everyone can do it? Well maybe they’re not actually thinking this but my recently-battered pride is stoking my imagination. Do French women ski during pregnancy? Something tells me they might.
The fourth day is a whole other animal. Nicolas decides that we are ready for carving. “Bend your knees and lean. Watch me. Oui? Allez!” Except that this time things start to happen. The board points downhill but rather than heading off thoughtlessly on it’s own it starts to cut through the packed snow in one of those graceful arcing turns I’d seen on eXtreme. To be honest, this is probably a desparate fantasy borne to a discombobulated imagination fuelled by days of frustration but that was the first time that I really GOT snowboarding. What it was about, why people did it, how it inspired the cult following it enjoys with a massive slice of my generation, uniting everyone from accountants to rock stars under a single banner. C’est la bombe, bebe!
