new era for skiing. Major ski manufactures are creating "teams" of free ride, extreme, skiers. The manufactures pay the members up to $100,000 a year to ski and sharpen the company's image. Television is also playing a big role in the attempt to get today's youth interested in skiing. Sponsors are lining up behind big-air and extreme-skiing competitions. ESPN's Winter-X Games featured extreme skiing for the first time in 1998. K2's Jeff Manchara stated, "Why is it happening now? Because there is an opportunity with the plateauing of snowboarding. There's an opportunity for skiing to shine, to kind of come of age again. Skiing never really lost its cool. It was just overshadowed by snowboarding." (Hood) Skiing has even taken snowboarding tricks and used the tricks for every competition including the Olympics. Olympic gold medalist Johnny Mosely's 360 degree-mute-air grab in the mogul competition is straight out of snowboarding's bag of tricks. (Hood) Shane McConkey, 1995 national extreme skiing champion said in reference to extreme skiing, "It's just the next level for a lot of people. It use to be considered extreme, and crazy and ridiculous, a bunch of young guys out there chucking their carcass off a cliff. People have now realized that that's top-level skiing at it's finest. It's not extreme or crazy or anything. It's the sport of free-riding and it's growing huge because people finally understand it."(Hood)There is still the debate of which is more fun. Tom Sims said, "In my opinion, Snowboarding is inherently more fun. It's hard to explain, but when you do a snowboard turn and can drag your hand in the snow and pretend you're on a twenty-foot wave, it just seems more fun than planting a ski pole and making a turn." (Atkin) It does not matter which is more fun as long as the skier or snowboarder is having fun doing it. The major thing is that skiers and snowboarders need to respect the rights of others. When a ...
