The Trailblazers At 43, Marla still trains and races, and she says it’s great to be competing against deeper women’s fields these days. She also devotes time to teaching clinics—something she says is more rewarding than winning contests—and supports emerging pros. She made a splash in the sports world with a cover story in Outside magazine in 2000 that included a nude black-and-white photo in which she’s poised on her mountain bike. Aside from being provocative, the photos and the accompanying story brought attention to both the sport and its female participants. “I always felt like I wanted to bring femininity to downhill [mountain bike] racing,” says Marla. “For that nude photo, I grew long hair. I was trying to be sexy. I wanted to show that you can be feminine and still get on your bike and be aggressive.” That message has sunk in. It’s no longer uncommon to see a young girl riding a downhill bike, wearing a full-face helmet. One woman who got the message is 26-year-old Kathy Pruitt, current U.S. Nationals downhill champ. “I’ve looked up to Marla as a role model for how to promote yourself in this sport of mountain biking and, even more importantly, [how to do so] as a respectable woman,” says Kathy. The fact is most competitive action sports have high barriers to entry for women, in terms of both the attitude held by male participants and the disparity women perceive from the industry built around the sport. But so long as the women’s competitive field continues to grow, and with it the coverage of the sport in mainstream media, the gap should continue to close. Despite its cultural connections to skateboarding, snowboarding has traditionally been much more welcoming to women. From early on in snowboarding’s skyrocketing popularity in the late 1990s, “there were women in powerful positions within [snowboarding] companies,” says Kathleen Gasperini, co-founder of the Label Lab, a youth branding consultancy, and a former editor at Powder and Transworld Snowboarding magazines. These women had influence on everything from women’s gear design to creating contests for female riders, she says. “This made snowboarding more of a genderless sport compared with skiing. There were almost always women’s events. Prize money is pretty equal [between men and women] in snowboarding, too.” Kathleen says the ski industry moved at a glacial pace in accepting women into the fold. “It took a good 20 years for the ski industry to realize that women’s skiing was a viable industry; they got onboard due to what they saw in snowboarding,” she says. Of course it wasn’t just female cash flow that piqued the ski industry’s interest in women skiers. It was also the shockingly fluid and gutsy lines that women like Wendy Fisher were laying down in increasingly popular extreme skiing contests. In 1994, after seven years on the U.S. Ski Team, Wendy felt her passion for ski racing fade and decided to quit. Two years later she paid a visit to Kim Reichhelm in Crested Butte, Colorado. Kim was also an alum of the ski team and held the title of women’s winner of the first World Extreme Skiing Championships in Valdez, Alaska, in 1991. Influenced by Kim, Wendy decided that rather than drop out of skiing altogether she’d take a stab at freeskiing (aka extreme skiing, though that term has faded). Wendy placed third in her first freeskiing contest but quickly used her ski-racing background to identify and change what she calls the “mental mistakes” that dogged her in the first race. By 1998 she was dominating the women’s field. Then, as the century turned, the ski industry took a shine to freeskiing in a big way, and Wendy found herself doing competitions with more mainstream publicity. Events such as the X Games and the Gravity Games started featuring skier-cross and freeriding competitions. It was no longer a fringe sport. All the while Wendy was traveling with crews of (mostly male) freeskiers to film ski movies. She did eight different films for Matchstick Productions as well as a couple of Warren Miller flicks, and she starred in a couple of ski films exclusively about women skiers and snowboarders. |
