slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
In February, Tanner Hall, one of the greatest freestyle skiers of all time—he won seven X Games gold medals and four silver in the Big Air, SlopeStyle, and Superpipe events between 2001 and 2009—signed a deal with a Denver-based cannabis-accessories company called Black Rock Originals. Hall, who is now thirty-two and based in northern California, near Lake Tahoe, helped the company create the Skiboss Collection, which consists of rolling papers, a cheese-grater-like card for grinding nuggets on the go, and a lighter, all tucked inside a travel-friendly pouch.
“We were all stoked,” Hall said recently, referring to everyone’s satisfaction with the finished product. He’d just returned to California after a few weeks of “ripping” in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. Near a backcountry lodge he co-owns, Hall and twelve pals built what he described as “a twenty-two-foot-tall Hot Wheels-type loop out of wood.” He continued, “We all filled it in and skied around Evel Knievel style. We crushed it hard.” The entire effort was filmed for a ski movie planned for release on iTunes this fall.
Hall is the first skier and, it appears, the second active professional athlete—behind ultra-runner Avery Collins, who is sponsored by Mary’s Medicinals—to formally partner with a cannabis company. For those who know him, this is not a big surprise: Hall has also inspired a line of ski gear (including a backpack and high-performance mittens) with the company DaKine, known, winkingly, as THC—that is, the Tanner Hall Collection. Still, it was an unprecedented move for a skier, even in the latter stages of his career, to accept outright sponsorship from a weed brand.
Black Rock Originals, for its part, presents itself as the anti-stoner cannabis company. It promotes a series of online videos showing active and athletic people using cannabis with the hashtag #IAmNotLazy. One of its informational films is called “How to Exercise High.” The company even has a testimonial from a retired gold-medalist snowboarder about the useful effects of cannabis in sport. Ross Rebagliati won the giant-slalom event at the 1998 Winter Olympics, in Nagano, Japan, with THC, pot’s main psychoactive molecule, in his blood. (The gold medal was revoked on account of a positive drug test, then restored on appeal, because marijuana was not on the banned-substance list.)
Hall, too, believes that using cannabis can be beneficial to athletic performance. The proof, he says, is in his trophy case: he was on “chron,” as he prefers to call cannabis, when he won each of his medals. “I used it when I competed at the X Games,” he told me. “It helps with the stress, with the anxiety. And then, afterwards, as a relaxing agent and pain reliever. When your body is all tensed up, if you’ve got a pinched nerve or something, chron helps with that. I wouldn’t think about not using when I ski, because I don’t really know anything else. I’ve used it on a daily basis for about half my life, since I was maybe eighteen or nineteen. I prefer joints, but I also like edibles and vaporizers.”
He continued, “If you’ve ever skied on a powder day, you know you’re gonna stop in the trees at least two or three times a day to smoke a joint because of how good the snow is and how good a day it is. It brings you and your friends together. You give thanks to the mountain and the day and have a little meditation and just keep on ripping. It’s been a part of skiing for a long time.”
cont at
http://www.newyorker.com/news/sport...id=gnep&intcid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
“We were all stoked,” Hall said recently, referring to everyone’s satisfaction with the finished product. He’d just returned to California after a few weeks of “ripping” in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. Near a backcountry lodge he co-owns, Hall and twelve pals built what he described as “a twenty-two-foot-tall Hot Wheels-type loop out of wood.” He continued, “We all filled it in and skied around Evel Knievel style. We crushed it hard.” The entire effort was filmed for a ski movie planned for release on iTunes this fall.
Hall is the first skier and, it appears, the second active professional athlete—behind ultra-runner Avery Collins, who is sponsored by Mary’s Medicinals—to formally partner with a cannabis company. For those who know him, this is not a big surprise: Hall has also inspired a line of ski gear (including a backpack and high-performance mittens) with the company DaKine, known, winkingly, as THC—that is, the Tanner Hall Collection. Still, it was an unprecedented move for a skier, even in the latter stages of his career, to accept outright sponsorship from a weed brand.
Black Rock Originals, for its part, presents itself as the anti-stoner cannabis company. It promotes a series of online videos showing active and athletic people using cannabis with the hashtag #IAmNotLazy. One of its informational films is called “How to Exercise High.” The company even has a testimonial from a retired gold-medalist snowboarder about the useful effects of cannabis in sport. Ross Rebagliati won the giant-slalom event at the 1998 Winter Olympics, in Nagano, Japan, with THC, pot’s main psychoactive molecule, in his blood. (The gold medal was revoked on account of a positive drug test, then restored on appeal, because marijuana was not on the banned-substance list.)
Hall, too, believes that using cannabis can be beneficial to athletic performance. The proof, he says, is in his trophy case: he was on “chron,” as he prefers to call cannabis, when he won each of his medals. “I used it when I competed at the X Games,” he told me. “It helps with the stress, with the anxiety. And then, afterwards, as a relaxing agent and pain reliever. When your body is all tensed up, if you’ve got a pinched nerve or something, chron helps with that. I wouldn’t think about not using when I ski, because I don’t really know anything else. I’ve used it on a daily basis for about half my life, since I was maybe eighteen or nineteen. I prefer joints, but I also like edibles and vaporizers.”
He continued, “If you’ve ever skied on a powder day, you know you’re gonna stop in the trees at least two or three times a day to smoke a joint because of how good the snow is and how good a day it is. It brings you and your friends together. You give thanks to the mountain and the day and have a little meditation and just keep on ripping. It’s been a part of skiing for a long time.”
cont at
http://www.newyorker.com/news/sport...id=gnep&intcid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
