Although fresh snow at lots of Colorado ski areas was a no-show until very recently, the Denver Snow Show started last week with a Wednesday night ski fashion show that coincided with President Obama’s State of the Union speech. When, outside the Denver Convention Center, light snow fell as a symbolic good omen – for the Snow Show, if not for Obama.
Snow Show? Where’ve you been? Watching Fox “News”? After a 37-year run in Las Vegas, the ski trade show brought the biggest influx of convention folks to hit Denver in years; definitely since the Democratic Convention in 2008. Industry estimates say the four-day soiree drew more than 17,000 ski industry souls: manufacturers, sales reps, retailers and their buyers and even some media –credentialed freeloaders.
Last week’s visitors gladdened the hearts of sold-out hotels and restaurants along with bar and nightspot operatives; not to mention the Denver Convention & Visitors Bureau that’s now re-branded “Visit Denver.” So it’s not a big stretch to guess that the giddiest man at the show was Visit Denver communications chief Rich Grant.
Luring this major trade show away from Vegas was no small feat, with Denver emissaries tossing their first pitches nearly three years ago. But show organizer Snowsports Industries America (based just outside Washington, D.C., where trade associations like to cluster) has inked an 11-year contract to stage its extravanza in Denver. So, to recast a cliche, what happens in Denver should stay in Denver and local tourism optimists say the show, over the life of that contract, may pump nearly 350 million visitor bucks into a local economy that can certainly use it.
With the Winter Olympics in Vancouver two weeks away and sure to whet a public appetite for “snow sports” of all kinds, the Snow Show was a marriage made in booster heaven.
At the Convention Center last week, a space the size of several jetliner hangers would have greeted you with a halogen-lit Hieronymus Bosch-fantasy canvas. With skis and snowboards sporting skulls and graffiti and all manner of “retro” art running from “urban-edge” chain-link fences to Jackson Pollock abstract-splashes to New York subway-style graffiti that seemed lifted straight from 1972 that some of us can remember without referring to digital-recall art.
Many manufacturer booths offered DJs who apparently got paid by the decibel . Even gloves and hats, those mainstays of staid tradition, flashed insane art. You haven’t seen these looks; certainly not on the slopes this season, because they won’t show up in ski shops until Fall. At prices stiffer than old-style, no-camber, skis.
Rep after rep would tell you that the all-the-rage retro and urban edge is aimed at a young market (what ELSE is new?) that finds retro art, along with music – where “retro” means 1980s -and all the trappings of “punk,” appealing again. Many may be suburban kids who might not know a real street — we’re not talking cul-de-sacs — if it kicked them right in the ass. And how many genuine “urban” kids have the $600 or so some of these duded-up ‘boards will cost at retail? Which should say something about the wannabes who will actually buy into, so to speak, some of these trends.
Even if the show was taken out of Vegas, Vegas wasn’t entirely taken out of the show. Pioneer ‘board maker Burton flashed a huge area complete with Vegas casino-type signs and long-legged Vegas-style showgirls. Others had leggy ladies in fishnets. None of the guys – average age spread : 25 to 40 –complained.
Beyond the laid-back veneer of devil-may-care ambiance, the show was serious business for time-is-money exhibitors and reps showing wares, writing orders and poring over laptops. Most veterans of Vegas shows said they preferred Denver. Some of them may have been carefree shredders when ‘boarding — which essentially saved the ski industry — got started around 1977. Like those players, the industry has grown up since the halcyon days of Vegas shows in the mid-‘70s, seen there by this observer, when a 10 percent yearly growth rate was automatic. And Norwegian ski champion Otto Tschudi — just inducted into the Ski Hall of Fame — was at the top of his game; making the Vegas show rounds in his ZZ-Top beard. But the halcyon days are gone, and the industry – like Vegas itself – is a vastly different place.
Last week, the grand old man of skiing — Klaus Obermeyer himself — greeted buyers, reps and old friends from his huge display area. Shaking hands and posing for pictures with a genuine smile and warmth, the exuberant Obermeyer offered the mirror-opposite of Teutonic stereotypes. How old is he? “The newspapers say I’m 90,” he said. Which would make him just a year younger than legendary and reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who left us last week. Salinger also left his 1951 “Catcher In the Rye,” in which young Holden Caulfield feared, among other things, losing his youth and freedom to a world filled with “phonies.”
Holden might have found phonies at the Snow Show. But he might have also seen a celebration — however commercial and contrived – of youth and freedom; the twin touchstones of what was ultimately sold, to age groups well beyond the target demographic niche.
Today, many of us think we’d love to recapture that youth and freedom – real or imagined. But the price has gone up. It’s still possible to believe we can be part of a sun-on-the-slopes/ blasting-through-powder skier/shredder subculture. No problem. It just costs a lot more.
