Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Here are this week’s ten things I thought were worth sharing.
My next Open Thread with Type 2 guest Nick Hayes, in which Nick will be answering questions about our conversation and the Right to Roam campaign, goes live on Tuesday February 7th. The thread will be open to everybody, but the contest to win a Yeti cooler for best question as chosen by Nick is only open to paid subscribers.
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1. Cornwall pals! Chris, Lewis and Demi, the trio behind The Big Sea, are holding a special preview showing and Kickstarter launch at Finisterre in Saint Agnes on Monday February 13th - and I’ll be there hosting a live post screening Q&A with film-makers Lewis and Chris!
There are limited tickets available - click here to get yourself one, and I’ll hopefully see you there.
2. This is a proper weighty, even-handed and at times critical GQ piece on Nims Purja - the ‘Hype Man of the Himalayas’ as the title has it. Always nice to read some actual journalism in the outdoor world.
3. Eva Wiseman’s recent column on open water swimming sure ruffled a few feathers the other week, as presumably it was designed to. Personally, I can’t stand that type of lazy ‘I don’t like this thing, therefore I’m going to dismiss the entire culture’ writing, but she did have a couple of vaguely interesting points about the occasional zealotry of the movement at this point in its history. My pal Rebecca Olive cast a dispassionate eye on the whole debate in a follow up blog, which you can read here.
4. Arctic Roses by Vans, if only for Guch’s already iconic handplant. What a hero.
5. Long-term listeners to the podcast will know I’ve been following the debate on transgender participation in elite sport for a while now, so I was intrigued by Sean Ingle’s recent piece on World Athletics’ news DSD/transgender regulations. Read it here.
6. The comments on this Ski Magazine post about Mardi Fuller’s recent piece ‘Let’s Stop Celebrating the White Male Ski Bum’ (which you can read here) are illuminating and (IMHO, anyway) a tad disheartening. It never ceases to amaze me how threatened people get when somebody gently posits an alternative viewpoint about their own particular passion.
7. Exciting news from my neck-of-the-woods, as Sea Lanes, a new open water 50m pool and the new National Open Water Swimming Centre, nears completion after an epic ten-year mission. Find out more here. Yes, I’m going to be pretty much living there.
8. Mia Brookes on the podium at the Laax Open! What a mission for Mia and her family to get to this point…
9. Quite the fall-out from TikTockInfluencerGate at the X Games. Todd Richards sums up the (ahem) core position on this Reel above. My tuppence? Douglas Adams, as ever, covered this type of thing pretty comprehensively with this evergreen quote:
Sure, I found the whole thing a little cringe, thought it was executed terribly, and it certainly made me feel about 150 years old. But I’m assuming I wasn’t the target market. The most interesting thing for me is - yet again - how this debate feeds into the whole ‘What is snowboarding culture?’ conversation I’m increasingly fascinated by.
10. RIP Tom Verlaine. I was lucky enough to see Television at the Royal Festival Hall back in 2003 and it was as remarkable as I’d hoped it would be. I really enjoyed this completely geeky breakdown of his influence as a guitarist, and of course have been caning Marquee Moon (above) all week.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s selection. Leave a comment, or if you’re paid subscriber who has any feedback or questions about the newsletter or recent episodes of the podcast, you can contact me directly in the subscriber chat thread.
So. Many. Thoughts.
1. I dont do wild swimming - because even in a pool I am fairly certain there are sharks lurking and no one needs that crazy disrupting their peaceful outdoor swims. But Wiseman's column seems just...mean-spirited. Find a sport you love and go play it, lady, and chill.
2. The issue of transgender athletes in sports is one that so deeply interests me but also makes me want to put my head in the sand. I wholeheartedly support inclusivity in all things, BUT - and that but makes me cringe - there's science behind the issue and I don't like what the science says because it goes against my deep desire to be inclusive. So I put my head back in the sand. Yet I will continue to read and follow (and feel terrible about it all, all sides).
3. That POOL. On. The. List. ENJOY.
Now I am off to download the app and subscribe or whatever it is I have to do to help support you continuing this very entertaining venue. Thanks for doing the work so I just have to read stuff :)
And then I'm going skiing.
I've been really disgusted at the mainstream media coverage of trans athletics and trans issues in general. They're cherry picking the science since some studies show that trans women don't have an advantage over cis women (muscle mass and testosterone aren't everything). This Guardian piece basically misgenders Lia because she was never a male swimmer--she was assigned male and competed based on that assignment. And it's not like she was suddenly beating everyone all the time; she improved but never broke any records. I get really mad at this because we're seeing some people in surf and skate start to attack trans women competitors.
I shared my 2 cents on Todd's post, but I was also talking to someone who's in marketing for snowboarding and they don't like the gatekeeping. We're losing a lot of nuance amidst the cringing because there are legitimate issues with the choices X Games made, but casual fans are helping keep the sports alive. I remember when a whole bunch of teenage girls got into snowboarding after the 2012 Olympics and I don't think the industry ever capitalized off of that because the girls weren't taken seriously and the core doesn't like trendy things.