岩崎 航輔

Despite two decades having passed since Terje Haakonsen took his principled stance against the Olympic power brokers by abstaining from representing Norway in the 1998 Nagano Games, little has changed in terms of snowboarding's “us against them" struggle for self-determination on the grandest stage in all of sport. Just like clockwork, every four years the story of the Sprocking Cats boycott gets rehashed and then as if on cue the IOC once again gives snowboarding the shaft to remind us of our place in the pecking order. While the 2002 games in Salt Lake City and the Torino follow up showed marked improvement over our sports Olympic debut, Vancouver, Sochi and now South Korea are rife with instances that betray the Olympics as being the pinnacle of competitive snowboarding. As if to capitalize on the subtext of Terje's anti-Olympic stance smartphone accessory brand Bonx has produced a commercial featuring Haakonsen as he metaphorically passes the moral torch to Japanese Olympic outcast Yuki Kadono via a VoIP bluetooth earpiece. While Snowboarder appreciates the sentiment, the fact of the matter is that Yuki was denied the opportunity to represent his country in South Korea by Japanese snowboard team officials who didn't take kindly to some of Yuki's youthful indiscretions two years ago while he was competing in the “high country" of Colorado. Contrived or not, our takeaway from this edit is that snowboarding needs more powder and less politics.