There's Money in the Air

When they're not flipping feet-first through the frigid mountain air delivering some of the most mind-blowing tricks ever performed in a halfpipe, the country's best snowboarders can probably be found this week playing video games in their custom motor home that is emblazoned with the slogan, "Powered by Snickers." Or they might be found hanging out with their legions of teenage fans at Snickers-sponsored meet-and-greets, where autographs, posters and candy bars are free to all comers at the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix in Breckenridge, Colo.

The snowboarding hipsters who will likely represent the United States at the 2006 Winter Olympics have a reputation as free-spirited, counterculture relics. But after their medal sweep at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, they have embraced America's entrepreneurial spirit with Olympic-scale fervor, signing endorsement deals, embarking on film projects and launching their own clothing and equipment lines. An elite subset, led by 2002 gold medalists Ross Powers and Kelly Clark, has broken away from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, which limits the endorsements athletes may accept, and formed its own team known as "the Collection" largely because it was the only way to preserve its lucrative portfolio of sponsors.

The notorious free spirit of snowboarders -- whose wild, improvisational sport was shunned by skiing's mainstream until recently -- is entirely reconcilable with the goal of making one's first million by age 21, if not sooner, says Peter Carlisle, director of Olympics and action sports for Octagon, a McLean-based sports marketing firm.

The sport, after all, started with the invention of a product: the "snurfer" (now called a snowboard), akin to a surfboard built for snow. In snowboarding's infancy, kids were more eager to test its boundaries than adults. And snowboard manufacturers were more eager to develop kids' talents than was the U.S. skiing establishment, which looked down its nose on snowboarding as a threat to Alpine skiing's serenity and supremacy. So top-notch snowboarders, even if they were children, soon found themselves supplied with free boards. Powers, the sport's first prodigy, signed his first deal with Burton snowboards at age 10 and competed in his first U.S. Open with his fourth-grade class cheering him on.

"In order to survive and function in the sport of snowboarding, these kids have to think entrepreneurially," says Carlisle, who represents the Collection. "They're not stupid. They've learned that they can't not care about money because then they can't afford the lift tickets or the international travel. If you didn't assemble your own portfolio of sponsors, you're not a professional, and you're going to work in a restaurant."

With Carlisle's guidance, the Collection has hired its own coach, physical therapist and team manager; licenses its group rights and members' individual rights; and arranges its own travel to competitions around the world (sometimes sharing rental houses; sometimes traveling in the Snickers RV).

While the Collection operates outside the purview of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, the governing body that will select the 16-member Olympic snowboarding team for the Turin Games, its members are considered favorites to make the squad because they're so good -- particularly at its most creative discipline, the halfpipe.

Snowboarding's halfpipe is essentially an icy launching pad carved in the snow. Boarders race up the sides of the "pipe" and hurl themselves in the air, where they flip in endless variations before landing upright and skidding across the other side of the pipe to launch themselves again. The sport isn't judge against a clock, and there are no compulsory elements. Instead, riders are graded on their daring, creativity, amplitude and awe-quotient.

TV exposure through ESPN's X Games spurred an ardent following among American youngsters. Snowboarding's inclusion in the 1998 Nagano Olympics gave it its first stamp of legitimacy. Powers, then 18, won bronze. Four years later, Clark won the United States' first medal at Salt Lake City, claiming gold in the women's halfpipe, and Powers led the men to a 1-2-3 medal sweep, marking the first U.S. sweep of a Winter Olympic event since 1956.

"It was huge for the mainstream side of our sport," recalls silver medalist Danny Kass. "At first we didn't even know what we had done. People were freaking out. I said, 'What's the big deal?' And I remember somebody informing us we had just made history, and us being kind of clueless."

By then, corporate America was eager to embrace snowboarding as a means to tapping into the coveted Gen-Y demographic that followed it. Defined as those born between 1981 and 1995, the offspring of Baby Boomers has been pegged by Madison Avenue as the largest consumer group in U.S. history but one that's tricky to reach -- wary of overt commercialism and more receptive to products it deems relevant to the places they hang out, whether online or off-line.

For the makers of Snickers, snowboarding was the ideal vehicle. "The Collection gives Snickers a very unique and authentic way to connect with a younger audience and also become relevant in their everyday activities and individual lifestyles," explains Joan Buyce, public relations manager for Snickers. "Snickers is all about on-the-go, instant satisfaction."

Meanwhile Kass, snowboarding's biggest star who is not a member of the Collection, has pursued his own business venture, founding Grenade Gloves, a sports outfitter that does an estimated $1 million in sales annually, with his older brother Matt. The company started with a logo and marketing strategy that involved mailing stencils of the logo to riders across the country so they could spray-paint "Grenade Gloves" anywhere they chose. Only later did the actual product come along. Under the motto, "Make Gloves Not War," Grenade Gloves now makes gloves (in black, olive and "slime"), as well as T-shirts, belts, socks, scarves, wallets, key chains and women's outwear. It has also produced four videos. The latest, "Smell the Glove," is billed as "a snowboard rockumentary" that "does for snowboarding what 'The Sound of Music' did for hills."

"There's a lot of creative people in snowboarding," says Bob Klein, Kass's agent. "They're young, have a lot of energy, love what they're doing and are trying to think of a way to keep on doing things that are fun without having to get a real job."

Like Powers and Clark, Kass earns far too much money from endorsements to see any point in joining the U.S. Ski and Snowboard team. Elite boarders can earn anywhere from $300,000 to $1 million a year; as much as 90 percent of that may come from endorsements. While U.S. Snowboard team members get roughly $25,000 in benefits, according to Klein, they have to surrender the right to sign endorsement deals with nearly 50 categories of products and companies to avoid conflicting with the U.S. team's existing sponsorships.

Kass says he has no interest in joining the Collection, either. "I talked to him about it," Klein said, laughing, "and he said, 'I have a motor home of my own.' "