The NY Times Butchers Snowboarding In Article About Olympics + Deaths
The New York Times… you should be ashamed of yourselves. John Jeremiah Sullivan… you should be as well. Why would you have someone with zero knowledge of snowboarding write an article about snowboarding? Bring back Jesse Huffman. He has already done great work for you.
It was all going so well too. You some pretty on-point articles about surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding. To the point of surprise really. You take on the ‘fake news’ bashing of Trump and his lunatic circle of swamp monsters daily. Kudos for that, but please, bury this article about “big-air Olympic snowboarding and deaths on the mountain.” It’s absolutely terrible. Media coverage like this is why many in surfing and skateboarding don’t want any affiliation with the Olympics and the mainstream press that comes with it.
Sample:
Death is always near where big air is getting caught. For that matter, regular old small-air snowboarding can be plenty life-threatening. Granted, most of the deaths are avalanche-related. Some result from helicopter crashes, when riders are searching for untouched snow in the high mountain passes. One biggie that is more clearly attributable to human error: collisions — most often between a rider and a stationary object, like a tree or a finish-line pillar (the Swiss champion Daniel Loetscher died in the latter way).
Then there are the weird ones, the isolates. A guy in Colorado was snowboarding along and hit an ice patch, which accelerated him to some ungodly speed, and he zoomed into a “boundary marker rope,” which wrapped him up and strangled him or snapped his neck. Five years ago a snowboarder zoomed into an ice tunnel. He was with his friends, and apparently he said, “I’m going to zoom into this ice tunnel!” Just as he did, the tunnel collapsed on top of him. It had been waiting. His friends tried to dig him out (the friends always try), but the ice was like “concrete.”
Click to THE NEW YORK TIMES for a good laugh at the worst article ever about snowboarding
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