Last weekend was kind of a season opener for Finnish skiers. The traditional Ski Exhibition, Skiexpo, was held at the Helsinki Fair Center. And, even more traditionally, several clubs, movie premieres and other events were organized all over the city.

As a family man, I don’t get to visit clubs and bars that often any more but this weekend was a pleasant exception. I managed to get out both Thursday and Friday nights and I checked out the expo itself on Sunday.

The Freeskiing movie Roots had its premiere Thursday evening at Cuba Cafe in Helsinki. Too bad I was late and didn’t get to see the movie itself. It was good to see some old skiing friends and have a chat about skiing though. It seems like these days I mostly write on the Internet about skiing – no one at my day job could care less about the subject…heh. Anyway, we will try to get a copy of Roots soon and review it too.

Northern Scrapbook Premiere

Well, actually this was a second premiere as the first one the world premiere was held one day earlier in Rovaniemi. On Friday night it was time to show the movie for those of us in southern Finland. The party and show were organized in the Cultural Factory Korjaamo in Helsinki. There were two shows, one for invited guests and one for a general audience. All in all some 600 hundred people or even more got to see the movie and join the party.

About the movie itself: I haven’t seen too many snowboarding films lately, but I guess it is pretty safe to say this was the best Finnish one so far. I especially dug the documentary scene in the beginning of the film, say the first 20-30 minutes. After that the movie turned into your “normal” snowboard flick, meaning parts by rider, filled with crazy stunts of any kind. Don’t get me wrong: these guys are amazingly good – it is just that if you are not into details of technical freestyle, then footage of this kind easily gets repetitive no matter how crazy the tricks are or how enormous the kickers get.

That said, at the end of the flick there was some really “new school” urban, super technical jibbing I dug a lot. This part of snowboarding has progressed in very creative ways in the recent years. “Normal” rails also seem to be “out” and all kinds of imaginative lines off/on/in between roofs, ledges, stairs, rocks, fences and any kind of urban and natural formations seem to be “hip”. Very skateboard like and very cool in my book. They also showed some nice Finnish spring sessions from Lapland – which is probably the best riding our country can offer and thus always a nice bonus.

Check out the Northern Scrapbook – it is available with snowboard magazines such as Onboard (EU), Snowboarder (USA), Slammer (FIN)!

Skiexpo Exhibition

To be honest, I wasn’t even that enthusiastic about going to the whole event at all.

To me it seems like fairs like this have lost their meaning year by year. I mean, consumers learn about products on the Internet way before they hit the shop shelves, reps probably even have the next year’s skis in their demo fleet the previous spring, and so on. It seems like web shops are also stealing a lot of the market from traditional ski shops, especially in the small market areas like ours. Whether that is bad or good remains to be seen. Ski tuning and maintenance, boot fitting and all kinds of tech problems still belong to your local, trusty shop, but if you can get almost anything ski-related from the web quickly and for cheap, IMHO that just benefits the consumer.

Also, I don’t know if this was a sign of the beginning recession but I felt like there was significantly less exhibitors than, say, five years ago. The booths have also changed from showing the new equipment more and more to clothes and all kind of discount sales that are not even related to skiing. Fashion probably sells but personally I’d like to see more technical innovations and future projects etc. Take that with a grain of salt though…all of us here are hopeless ski gear nerds, after all.

I took a few pictures. Below are a few thoughts about some of the skis I fondled at the exhibition. Hand-flexing the skis is not a very sharp way to analyze the ski flex but I did it anyway (don’t we all at times?).

Rossignol Skis -Seven Artistic Sins. The skis were presented as pieces of art (which they actually are). One of the few rather creative booths.

Völkl Freeride Line-Up. The Kuro (on the right) is MASSIVE in real life. In general, Völkl skis feel a bit heavier and stiffer than average. In comparison, e.g. K2 skis felt much softer…on the hand flex scale of course.

Black Diamond skis. Somehow these sticks yell quality. Light and STIFF, espacially Verdict and Zealot. The Megawatt (on the right) felt a bit friendlier in the oh-so-scientific hand-flex test. I'd still say these are not for the unexperienced and/or slow skier.