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November 7, 2007

Freestyle Ballet Skiing – The Swan Lake Of Skiing

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Written by: Marko Pyhajarvi
Tags: ,
balletski

Jump into Homeboy’s time machine. We will now take a ride back into 1990′s, to the glorious days of freestyle ballet skiing. Do you remember those days? Man, I was one of those, practicing ballet skiing tricks on slopes.. No, I don’t feel ashamed at all. It was great, even though right now it looks pretty funny.

Check out the ballet skiing video below. It is from 1990′s. Look at the clothing we used to wear on those days? Do you remember climbing sunglasses and the white “lipstick kind of stuff” you put on your lips to protect from the sun? This is even worse… Do you remember the neon-colored overalls? If you were a freestyle skier, you must have wore them. Mine was neon-green…

Those were just great times, although today some things look a bit funny. I remember myself practicing ballet skiing moves on slopes a couple of nights on weekdays and moguls skiing on weekends. I quit training super-G and slalom and moved to freestyle for few years just because it was so damn hot back then. I was so keen on skiing that I even went practicing ballet skiing volts to a beck with my friends. It was interesting and challenging and that is probably the reason we were so interested in it.

One day it all stopped. Ok, not exactly on one day, but during one season it all just stopped. Ballet skiing disappeared. Suddenly it was all gone by the wind. The good thing was that moguls skiing got more attention and it became very popular. Anyhow, freestyle ballet skiing was gone and will probably never come back. Or will it? Just think about it. All 80′s rock music is very popular nowadays. May be after 2010 ballet skiing will come back. I just wonder how could we do ballet skiing with today’s skis, like K2 skis. Let’s wait and see.

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About the Author

Marko Pyhajarvi
I am an old-school alpine skier, snowboarder and telemarker, and I love writing. Therefore I founded Homeboy. I (too) enjoy powder, mountaineering and backcountry skiing as well as photographing. Nowadays, as an old fart, I mostly ski with my kids and focus on financing their hobbies.




 
 

 
digitalfreestyle

80s-90s freestyle ski video collection

So someone just digitalized a bunch of 80s and 90s freestyle skiing videos. There's several hours of ski ballet, aerials, mogul skiing and whatnot all in funky 80s outfits complete with jetpants and so on, it can't get any better!
by Juho Karhu
3

 
 
freestyle-skiing-history-in-finland-1

How Freestyle Skiing Came to Finland in the 70s

Written by our guest writer Markku Rimpiläinen this article offers a sneak-peek in the 70s freestyle skiing, complete with some oldschool photos!
by Marko Pyhajarvi
2

 



6 Comments


  1. Looks pretty tough…never tried it myself.


  2. Damion

    I did compete in Ballet, but only so I could get teh overall medals with Air and moguls. It was kinda the bastard child of the group. It was great to play on the 110 boards. You could throw some crazy tricks.



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