They were crazy kids doing tricks on snow. In the earliest days, freestyle skiers - back then they were also called hotdog skiers, or stunt skiers, or sometimes acrobatic skiers - would combine the bumps and jumps of moguls, the big air of aerials, and the tricks and intricate maneuvers of ballet skiing into a single, madcap run down the mountain. But the three subdisciplines began as one. Today, any fan of the Winter Olympics is familiar with mogul skiing - where athletes clamp their knees together and bounce down a bump-filled course like human pogo sticks - and aerials, which features skiers flying through the air like gymnasts off a vault, completing twists or flips or other contortions in midair before landing on their skis. Young people in North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s “rejected the strictures associated with alpine racing and constipated European ski technique, innovating with mogul skiing, aerial maneuvers, and ski ballet,” longtime ski writer Leslie Anthony concurred in his 2010 book, White Planet: A Mad Dash Through Modern Global Ski Culture. So freestyle skiing was that, in fact, personified.” After the draft and the protests and the flag-draped coffins, “the youth of America was starting to question the established rules and regulations,” ski ballet pioneer Bob Howard told me. It started - no, really - with the Vietnam War. But they didn’t tell me where ski ballet had come from, or where it had gone. The videos I found were equal parts amusing and impressive. The skiers were judged, as in figure skating, on a combination of technical and artistic considerations. In formal competitions, athletes skied down a smooth, gentle slope, combining jumps and flips and spins with complex edge work and sweeping choreography. I went home that night and fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of grainy footage from the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s: tasseled costumes, synthesized music, triumphant spandexed West Germans. No one at our dinner table full of winter sports enthusiasts had even heard of it. The discipline she’d competed in - a weird hybrid of figure skating and gymnastics, but on skis - didn’t exist anymore. She’d competed on the freestyle skiing World Cup circuit in the 1990s, she explained. A few glasses of wine and a friend of a friend up on her feet on the far side of the table, striking poses, waving her arms, showing us her old moves.
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