Debate is renewed about who the final torchbearer for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be after organisers announced that it won’t be hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. Furlong said spectators will find out the final torchbearer’s identity on Friday night: “You can think about this as long as you’d like and you can think about the…
Category: mountain culture
Thrillseekers – you were born to huck…
New research underway at the University of British Columbia suggests those Olympic ski racers and aerialists preparing to hurl themselves down mountains were destined to seek out excessive speeds and massive air… they may be genetically pre-disposed to thrill-seeking behaviour. UBC PhD candidate Cynthia Thomson was encouraged to pursue her line of research when her…
Sustainable tourism is frog pose.
Okay, so technically I was procrastinating last weekend when I sat down at my desk and started thinking about what sustainable tourism means to me… Technically, I already had something I should have been working on… Technically, writing that article was going to contribute to my own personal fiscal sustainability. Inspiration strikes in this way….
2010 reasons to head to Pemberton this February
The inukshuk, an Inuit wayfinder, points the way to Pemberton. There are easily 2010 Reasons to Take a Road-Trip to Pemberton This February – lots of the community’s attributes were crowd-sourced at GamesTown2010 – almost 500 submissions were logged by local chest-beaters, and people are still posting… The Village of Pemberton, Chamber of Commerce and…
The Centre Cannot Hold – Olympics and Anti-comps put the squeeze on Freeskiing
The X Games takes place in Aspen at the end of this month, and 39 of the 250 competitors are past and present Olympians. The roster definitely skews to past Olympians, because X Games organisers have been burned by the Olympics in the past. I spoke with Chris Schuster, Competition Director for the X Games…
5 things I learned from Bob and Sue Adams about the entrepreneurial spirit
When Bob and Sue Adams were told they were the 2009 Lifetime Members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, they had to take each other’s pulses. “Life membership?” they joked. “Are we that old?” “I guess it’s the end of the road…” I sat down with them this summer for a hilarious tag-team conversation,…
How to Become a Pro Skier, with cheat notes from Malcolm Gladwell and TJ Schiller
Malcolm Gladwell wanted to understand why some people become super-successful. He believed that “the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work“, because there are more variables involved in individual success than we’d like to admit. So he wrote the number one best-seller Outliers. The professional…
Olympics won’t be thwarted by fickle snow gods
Whistler writer Leslie Anthony went looking for Ogopogo for Explore magazine last year, and placated himself re: his failed quest to find the Great Lake Snake by recalling the words of a famous sasquatch hunter: Although he spent huge amounts of time and money searching for the creature, in a moment of startling candour he’d told an interviewer: ‘It sure…
Canadian Olympic athlete doping ring exposed
When my brother and I were kids, we weren’t ever given cold and flu medication. Our dad was a pharmacist… a pharmacist who pimped litres of sugar syrup during cold and flu season believing it was the biggest rort on the planet. It drove him nuts to be asked by earnest customers, “Well, which of those 60 different cough…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 