Showing posts with label Olympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Olympics. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
NY Times - Shaun White Featured In "Snowboarding's Summer Session"
The New York Times has a circulation of 1,000,665.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
NY Times Mentions Burton Riders in Olympic Training Article
Spring Training For Snowboarders
New York Times
05/03/2009
Great painters never see a blank canvas, only the possibilities.
That same principle holds for athletes. And for a snowboarder, there is no stage more suited for pushing the realms of possibility than the 500-foot-long superpipe at Buttermilk Mountain outside Aspen. It is snowboarding's Mecca, given the crowds it attracts each year for the Winter X Games and the reverence with which some of the world's best halfpipe riders view it. Which is why, less than a year from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, U.S. Snowboarding officials worked out a deal with the Aspen Skiing Company to hold an exclusive two-week camp for top riders last month after the lifts had stopped running for the season. There were no TV cameras, crowds or bright lights, only a blank canvas for experimentation. The early feedback was promising. Gretchen Bleiler, a silver medalist in the halfpipe at the 2006 Olympics, worked tirelessly one day on a combination that had never been done before in women's halfpipe competition. The series of tricks, an inverted 720-degree spin known as a 720 crippler followed by a cab 720 off the opposite wall of the pipe, is the realization of years of progression. To Bleiler, the process of getting the combination down felt like one long headache. ''With any new trick, I'm always frustrated because it takes a lot more energy to do it than an easier, simpler trick,'' she said. ''It's frustrating in a good way, though, because I am pushing myself.'' She added, ''This is when you kind of just need to keep going, keep plugging away, keep pushing past your boundaries and then all of the sudden it's just natural.'' That line of thinking is prevalent among snowboarders during the spring. Once the competitive season winds down and the temperature begins to rise, the race heats up among the sport's elite athletes to come up with the next wave of tricks. To facilitate that process, Mike Jankowski, U.S. Snowboarding's halfpipe coach, said the team camp was the obvious next step. At Buttermilk, the riders not only had the huge pipe to themselves, but also the services of two snowmobile drivers to ferry them up the mountain. There were also staff members on site to salt the snow when it got too soft or to add blue dye when the lighting was flat, as well as to recut the walls of the halfpipe each night. Although the setting was ideal, Jankowski said advances in the sport were fostered not by the pipe but by the riders. Already motivated individually, they also pushed each other to do more. Riders got as many as 25 runs a day during the camp. Among those filtering in and out of the daily sessions included Steve Fisher, a two-time Winter X Games champion, and Kevin Pearce. Both have beaten the sport's star, Shaun White, in competition. And to keep up with White, both were hard at work on tricks that were once seemingly pipe dreams before edifices like the one at Buttermilk came into being. One trick Jankowski said to watch for next winter was a double-corked 1260, a spin cycle of three and a half rotations and two off-axis flips. The last two Olympic champions in women's halfpipe, Hannah Teter and Kelly Clark, were also training in Aspen, leaving White as the only noticeable absentee, despite invitations from the United States team. He certainly had a good excuse. While his competition was trying to keep in step, White was reportedly taking a break after his camp at perhaps the only pipe in the world that could rival Buttermilk's: a private halfpipe built on the backside of remote Silverton Mountain in Colorado. Red Bull reportedly contributed $500,000 to the halfpipe's construction. Among other things, the pipe was reportedly accessible only via helicopter or snowmobile and featured a foam pit at the base of one end to allow White to try whatever new tricks he could dream up. Jankowski did not want to speculate about what those were, but he did say tricks like the double-corked 1260 would probably be much more prevalent during next winter's Olympic qualifying Grand Prix, much the way back-to-back 1080s were the must-have combination before the 2006 Winter Olympics. Although the addition of another revolution showcases evolution, Jankowski said the real progress was in the subtle way tricks were refined to look natural. It is not about the spinning so much as how it looks. And to get it down perfect, it takes a lot of practice and snowmobile trips back up the mountain. ''There's the obvious progression from a 10 to a 12 or from a 12 to a 14, but one of the key things our guys and girls have done is make sure that we're not upping the ante and we're not upping the rotation level unless we're grabbing and it's smooth and it looks good,'' Jankowski said. Jankowski said he hoped the effort would pay off. The United States took four of the six medals in halfpipe at the last Olympics in Turin, Italy, but Jankowski said he expected stiffer competition next winter in Vancouver. ''We don't take anybody lightly, but we definitely want to maintain our position as the ones to beat, as the ones who set the bar,'' he said. ''We don't want to be playing catch-up.''
Friday, February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Shaun and Kelly are featured in Sports Illustrated’s 2010 Olympics!
The article, “Good’n’Ugly” by Austin Murphy, takes a look at the recent World Cup at Cypress Mountain in Vancouver and goes in depth on the challenges facing the 2010 Winter Olympics Halfpipe venue.
The piece describes the competition as underwhelming, but reinforces Shaun’s “near-perfect run”, claiming his “fourth win in six events”, and Kelly as the “low-key, high-flying Vermonter” who is on the journey for another gold. Both Shaun and Kelly are quoted in the article. Kelly is quoted as she describes her training, focusing on the little things, and looking forward to the Olympics. Shaun is also called out on the cover of the issue.
Sports Illustrated has a circulation of 3.2 million.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Canada's Largest National Newspaper Features Jake and Shaun in Olympic Preview
VANCOUVER 2010: ONE YEAR OUT: CAMERA READY: SHAUN WHITE
U.S. snowboarder at top of fame mountain
DAVID EBNER
February 12, 2009
Forget about downhill skiers, hockey players and figure skaters. The most famous - and marketable - athlete expected to go for gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is a snowboarder.
It's much more likely you know him, and his mop of long, curly red hair, from magazine covers or Hewlett-Packard Co. commercials than for his seemingly impossible 1260s - 3½ full rotations, picture a spinning top - as he explodes from the steep walls of a snowboard halfpipe at the X Games.
Shaun White, already a star before gold at the Turin Games in 2006 launched him to mass-market fame, is a rare athlete. Fiercely competitive, yes, but bursting with personality, unlike golf's Tiger Woods (selling luxury watches and Nike products) or swimming's Michael Phelps (who hung out with Tony the Tiger on cereal boxes until his "regrettable" bong hit).
Consider White as version 4.0 of what's become Snowboard Inc. - fun, yes, still raw and a bit reckless, certainly, but big money, without doubt. Endorsements bring him an estimated $10-million (U.S.) a year.
Print Edition - Section Front
"Take away the trappings of fame. Do you want to be Shaun White or Michael Phelps?" asks Max Valiquette, president of Y Syndicate, a group of youth-marketing companies in Toronto. "Who's more fun, who has cooler friends, who do you want to hang out with? It's all Shaun White."
White, 22, the dude you'd expect to be smoking weed, never comes off awkward or weird.
Whether it's on the cover of business magazine Fast Company, or Rolling Stone, or in a new film about his visit to the remote Hokkaido backcountry in Japan for sponsor Red Bull, the energy drink, White is casual and never stiff, a relaxed Southern California style, where he grew up and lives, a guy you'd actually like to hang out with. Never mind that he's a ridiculously amazing halfpipe rider, and is a double threat - a top-tier skateboarder in his spare time, with an eye on the 2012 Summer Olympics in London if skateboarding, as speculated, enters the Olympics.
It's marketing gold, harder to find than the metal itself.
Skip the superficial equation of snowboarding equalling cool, and jump to why, Valiquette says. It's creative. It's kind of wild. It's fun. Most of all, it's not just about being really, really good at something.
Valiquette hardly needs to add, alluding to the new Shaun White Snowboarding video game by Ubisoft: "No one's playing a swimming video game."
If White is the fourth wave of snowboarding, the first iteration was certainly Jake Burton Carpenter, who had an instinct, a dream and an economics degree in hand. He hacked together the earliest commercial snowboards in a barn in Vermont in the late 1970s, when the sport was in outlaw territory, not allowed on any ski mountains.
The second emerged in the 1980s with the sport's first hero, Craig Kelly, sponsored by Burton Snowboards Inc.
The third starred Terje Haakonsen, another Burton rider, perhaps the best in the sport's history and the gold-medal favourite in 1998 in snowboarding's first appearance at the Olympics. But he spurned the event, likening the International Olympic Committee to the mafia.
White, a Burton rider since he was a kid, is at once ingrained by, and freed from, the past.
"He's become a superstar and plays that role better than anybody ever has," says Carpenter, owner of privately-held Burton. "Craig was big, Terje was huge, but Shaun's on a whole other level. Those guys were never on the cover of Rolling Stone. And a lot of that is attributable to Shaun."
Like the smartest of business people, White is careful to keep his commodity valuable by limiting its supply - and choosing partners with caution. He has a tight coterie of corporate sponsors and, after his gold in 2006, didn't blurt yes to the hundreds of offers as they poured in.
"Every week," his agent says, "we get presented with a big opportunity from someone. Shaun turns down a lot of money."
The way sponsors such as computer maker HP use White in commercials and campaigns - and how they use him sparingly - is another telling marketing tale.
HP, in 2005, was getting pounded, as usual, by Dell Inc., on the assembly-line side of computer selling, and by Apple Inc., on the creative side. In a slow but sure corporate reimagination, HP did what it barely ever did, sponsor an athlete, White, then not even 20 and mostly unknown outside snowboarding.
Not long thereafter, two things happened. White won gold - and was on magazine covers and television talk shows. Famous. Around the same time, David Roman, former Apple marketing executive, after some in-between work, joined HP. He coined the phrase: "The computer is personal again."
Another idea came up: hands. How a computer is used. Take marketing photos of celebrities - "achievers" in HP marketing parlance - without using their faces. First up, White, a lover of technology, games, photos, videos, music, a MySpace.com page. He loved the idea. And even after subsequent achievers such as rapper Jay-Z, tennis star Serena Williams and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, White's was still the biggest hit.
And, yes, HP sold more computers, and reused the spot last summer - two years after it first aired, almost unheard of - for a back-to-school campaign. But it doesn't use White much.
HP learned it wasn't about wallpapering a star on a billboard on every interstate in the United States. It was about something much deeper, and thus something potentially much more valuable.
"HP is an old brand, we've been around forever, and our weakest area was the youth space," says Roman, an HP marketing vice-president. "Shaun is such a great ambassador, the way he connects with kids, but at the same time, the way he uses technology."
It's all about real personality.
"Shaun has a much tighter link with his generation than I would suspect Michael Phelps has," Roman says. "We know Phelps for eight gold medals. You don't know him."
***
The hit chart
Snowboarding, in a single decade, has gone from Olympic oddity to marquee event - and it boasts the Winter Olympics' most famous competitor. Shaun White of the United States looks to defend his gold medal in the men's halfpipe in Vancouver in 2010. Here, based on google.com hits, is a list of athletes ranked by online popularity:
6.58 million Shaun White, U.S. snowboarder
5.05 million Lindsey Vonn, U.S. alpine skier
2.66 million Kim Yu-Na, South Korean figure skater
1.92 million Jenny Wolf, German speed skater
1.74 million Nicole Hosp, Austrian alpine skier
1.62 million Sidney Crosby, Canadian hockey player
1.47 million Brian Joubert, French figure skater871,000 Bode Miller, U.S. alpine skier
632,000 Alexander Ovechkin, Russian hockey player
623,000 Jennifer Heil, Canadian freestyle skier
390,000 Eric Guay, Canadian alpine skier
64,300 Cindy Klassen, Canadian speed skater
25,100 Pierre Lueders, Canadian bobsledder
Beyond sports, for comparison:
293 million U.S. President Barack Obama
92.5 million U.S. singer Britney Spears
4.05 million Prime Minister Stephen Harper
The Globe and Mail
ESPN the Magazine features Kelly Clark and Ellery Hollingsworth in their Olympic Insider section!
A snapshot of Kelly at the X games accompanies the piece. The section calls out that both Ellery, as a promising up-and-comer, and Kelly, as an established gold medal veteran, are close to making history by being the first woman to land a 1080. The piece also looks forward to their seasons and their possible Olympic berths.
ESPN has a circulation of 2 million.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Burton To Design 2010 U.S. Snowboarding Team Outerwear
Burton and Gore-Tex announced that they will again create the US Olympic team uniforms. Here's a list of coverage that we received as a result of this announcement:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Burton to Design U.S. Snowboarding Team Outerwear for the 2010 Olympics
Burton today announced that it will once again provide the official snowboard outerwear for the U.S. Snowboarding Team at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics as it did for the Torino 2006 Olympics. In addition,
“I’ve never been a fan of uniforms, but if anyone is going to outfit the U.S. Olympic Snowboarding Team, we’re the company that should step up and do it right,” said Jake Burton, Founder and Chairman of Burton Snowboards. “As with everything we design and manufacture, we have already brought together our creative people with some of our country’s best snowboarders to ensure that the final product will represent the riders, the sport and the
“The crew at Gore is truly stoked to be partnering with Burton Snowboards to outfit the U.S. Snowboarding Team for the upcoming Winter Olympics,” says John Reaney, NA snowsports category leader. “The Burton/GORE-TEX® product and design teams are working side by side in the development of the most progressively styled and technically functional garments for our Olympic Team. With the Olympic snowboarding events taking place in
Stay tuned for additional details about the U.S. Snowboarding Team Olympic outerwear as the Winter Games draw closer.
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