THE SHREDDING SEX

Rugged Riders sets out to rip up the male-dominated snowboarding industry

by CHRIS BARRY photos by ERIN HOGUE

Go to any snowboard park or major ski hill and you’ll probably discover that at least half of the snowboarders making the scene are female. Then, go to ESPN or TSN or any sports network that carries snowboarding and see how many female snowboarding competitions they’re covering.

Given how many women are into the sport, you may or may not be surprised to learn that you’re unlikely to find much, if any, coverage whatsoever. Now sure, if these chicks were all boarding topless, it would obviously make for a better, if not amazing, spectator sport, but even from a sheer economic standpoint, you’d figure the sporting industry would recognize this criminally overlooked market and show chicks the respect they deserve.

Amazingly, to date, this hasn’t been the case. But fret not, girls, things are changing. Tiffany Butler and Elysha Bastien, two very cool chicks who more than know their way around a woody, are fed up and doing something about the situation. Together they’ve launched Rugged Riders, an organization devoted to strengthening the local female snow and skateboard community.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” scoffs Butler, a quick-witted 23-year-old Concordia business student with a decade of boarding behind her. “Women make up for at least half the retail snowboard market but the major companies still aren’t investing back into the community through sponsorships for girls. But this is going to change. The woman’s snowboarding scene is about to explode and Rugged Riders is the bomb. We’re doing all we can to encourage girls to get involved and basically, to stand up for themselves. Girls deserve a place too.”

FRUSTRATION MOTIVATION

Butler says she and Bastien were moved to start Rugged Riders last year out of sheer frustration. “When we first decided to do this,” she explains, “we knew there were tons of girls into the sport, but there were no contests that included them, no camps for them—really, there was very, very little for girls. Snowboard competitions are male-dominated events, so when girls actually decided to show up at them, they’d find there were no girls categories because the organizers wouldn’t have anticipated them coming. So a girl would find herself having to compete against the guys, which obviously isn’t fair. She still has to pay the $30 to $100 fee to register, but up against 100 guys, some of them practically pros, she knows the max she’s going to win is maybe some crappy t-shirt, instead of the decent cash prize the guy who wins the overall event is going to get.”

“They’d always find these little things to prevent girls from participating,” she continues. “I remember going to a snowboard event in the Laurentiens where there were a bunch of girls who wanted to compete and the organizers just told us, ‘Okay, well, we’ll see how many guys register first, and if there are any spots available afterwards, we’ll see how many girls we can let in.’ Even then, they didn’t let all the girls who were there compete. And there weren’t many of us, maybe 10 in total. I mean, seriously, this isn’t the 1920s, here were girls who knowingly arrived to compete against guys and they still wouldn’t let us participate. That’s why we started Rugged Riders, we were just so fed up.”

GIRLS IN DROVES

Apparently they weren’t alone in their distaste for the situation. The first major Rugged Riders event, the Roxy Rugged Rail Jam held at Mont Avila last winter, saw over 75 girls participating. “It was totally awesome,” recalls Butler, “we were only expecting maybe 20 or 30 girls so when all these people came out, we were really caught off guard. We had so many people that we ran out of resources, we had to run out and photocopy registration sheets at the last minute. It was overwhelming, but in such a good way. We were going, like ‘Wow, this is so positive.’ It reaffirmed everything that moved us to start Rugged Riders in the first place.”

The success of the event, however, probably had as much to do with all their hard work as it did with satisfying a sadly neglected hole in the female snowboarding scene. “We really hustled to spread the word’, says Butler. “We were driving eight hours to events where we thought we might find girls we could tell about it. That’s one reason why we had all these girls coming from everywhere— like Toronto, the U.S. and Quebec City. We were offering an unprecedented—for girls, at least—$1,500 cash prize, we had snowboard clinics, basically, we had activities for girls at every level, from beginner to the most advanced. And it was so great. Especially for the beginners, because they got to see the advanced girls ripping and be really motivated by them. It’s probably the only time any of these girls ever got to ride with so many other girls, you know?”

BIG SEASON

This snowboard season promises to be a big one for Rugged Riders. The Rugged Riders Tricks R4 Chicks Snowboard Camp, sponsored by Roxy and Axis Boardshop, will be going down at Mont Blanc for four days and three nights from January 2–5, and Butler says they have “a ton of awesome activities planned,” not the least being the presence of pro female boarders Alexis Waite and Amber Stackhouse to teach campers a few tricks of the trade, and nightly jib sessions just outside of camp headquarters.

Later in the season, the Rugged chicks will be holding another Roxy-sponsored event, the Rugged Riders Jump’N’Grind contest, on March 10, again at Mont Blanc, with “big time cash and prizes.” To find out more, go to ruggedriders.com for a full schedule of this year’s activities.

“Rugged Riders is a lifestyle”, concludes Butler. “Go out there, do what you wanna do and be rugged about it. Don’t be afraid to hurt yourself on the hill, or venture in to some area that you’re unfamiliar with to do what you love. Don’t be afraid to move to Whistler and live in a car for two months if that’s what you need to do to follow your dream. That’s rugged.”