Latest / The Unmaking / S01E09: Ed Leigh - Broadcaster & Producer. Wānaka

Transcript

S01E09: Ed Leigh - Broadcaster & Producer. Wānaka · The Unmaking

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ed, welcome to The Unmaking.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Where are we parked and what's the significance of this location to you?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: We are parked at my house.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: This is the end of Peninsula Bay in Wanaka.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I was lucky enough to buy this as a bare section in 2019.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: And this,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: the land itself,
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: the house and everything around it is,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: it's like the culmination of my personal and professional life.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Made real.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Sian and I and the kids even built this up from a piece of bare land and it's
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: A pretty good reflection of who we are as a family now.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: I love...
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: I pinch myself every day that I get to call this home.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's the most spectacular piece of land.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: I have mountain bike trails around the house.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: We have a little micro mini ramp on the driveway.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: I thought, as a skateboarder, it's criminal to...
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Pour concrete on a driveway and not bend it up at the corners.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: The houses,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: we built it together with a lot of people from the skiing and snowboarding industry
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: from around Wanaka and the Southern Lakes.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: So there's quite a deep connection to the community and all of the things we've put into it.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Action and adventure sports aren't traditionally industries when you follow
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: a passion like that that build things like this.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: It looks quite opulent from the outside looking in but
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: both Sian and I have worked hard.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: I've been successful in the idea of showing my 21-year-old,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: scrotty,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: season-air self this house and saying,
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: you'll still love skateboarding,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: you'll still live close to the mountains,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: you'll be mountain biking, enjoying life with your kids.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty special in this.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: You would have bitten your arm off, I'm sure, at that point.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I can't yet.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: I do pretty much every day.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: I thank my lucky stars that I live here.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Looking at a sport like snowboarding, you can't get that time back.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: That time has gone forever.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: That was just a capsule and some of us got to experience it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: But there's other sports and other things now that are in exactly that same phase
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: that snowboarding was in the early 90s.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm fascinated by this.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: The further I get from that, the more I look at it.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Is there anything, I look at what my kids are into, is there anything that offers that freedom?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: My great worry with snowboarding now,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: when I go to competitions,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: is that the DJ's in his 40s,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: the speaker's in their 40s, the organisers in their 40s and 50s.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: When snowboarding had that golden age in the 90s and early 2000s, snowboarders ran it.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: There were very few.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: There were a couple of people in their 40s who ran the shops or
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: the distribution hubs who had that business acumen.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: But most people running comps, running brands were 20s and 30s.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're people like us.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a sense of ownership.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I look now at things my kids are into.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oscar was into trampoline for a while and that had it.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: But there was a sort of he shunned it.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: It had a kind of gym nerdiness to it.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't seen that sort of weird Norwegian cliff jumping belly flopping thing
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: that feels like it's got a bit of that.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty punk.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, it's almost a bit gimmicky.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, how can you build a culture around that?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas I look at what snowboarding and free skiing have done and skateboarding,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: surfing,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: all Mountain biking,
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: all of those worlds we live in and all of those sports had that nucleus.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: The germination in the mid-90s.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they've flourished into these incredibly rich cultures.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Multi-generational.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: And they've given me a profession.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: They've given me wife, friends and this incredible life that I live now.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Wanaka as a town, I think, is built on this.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: You look at the friendships people have and they come from that late 90s,
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: early 2000s when the town was...
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Establishing itself.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: And those bonds are so strong between people.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think with looking at action sports and particularly those ones
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: that have gone into the Olympic family?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Who's handled it the best or which sport has come out of that the best as a sport or
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: the least scathed by the collateral damage that going into that system can do to
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: a sport?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's such a huge,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: broad-reaching question because only snowboarding as an action sport,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: has total immersion with the IOC in the sense
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: that almost every facet has been sucked into the Olympic engine now.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: Skateboarding was...
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: Competing for skateboarding was only ever a part-time thing.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like the filming,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: the act itself,
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: the music,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: the art,
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: those elements are so much richer and more important to skateboarding than winning
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: a competition.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And did they try to do that with the UCI initially
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: with skateboarding?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was some really weird kind of,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: like even more weird than snowboarding and skiing in terms
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: of like strange bedfellows.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, weird battle.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: UCI wanted it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: The bigger battle was between roller sports, World Roller Skate, I think it's called.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Which would have been inline skating and roller skating initially ending at some point.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was World Skate came through.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I think you see Roller Skate acts as a parent company to the World Skate Federation.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: So from what I've seen and the people I've spoken to, World Skate has changed.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Almost autonomy.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: Apparently there's some kind of Don Corleone figure in
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: the Roller Federation who's kind of like, look, you guys are successful.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: You're doing it right as far as I'm concerned.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Do what you need to do.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: So he's a bit kind of heavy hitter,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: but he's not getting bogged down in the politics or the handling of the sport.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, I trust you, get on with it.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Skate is very happy with that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: So we get into these worlds.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Snowboarding has been a part of the Olympics since 98.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Sort of the middle of the golden era.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at the golden era of snowboarding from 92 to what should we say?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: 07, 10.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's when a lot of the parent companies started to get involved
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: in those rider owned companies.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: So even as the sport grew and it generated more money,
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: less money was flowing down to snowboarding.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: More was going upstairs to boardrooms and parent companies.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: So.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: There's this,
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: you've got that financial model changing from 1998 in Nagano
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: when snowboarding entered the Olympics to Lavigno,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: more snowboarding as this very,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: very core activity has found itself getting more and more corporatised.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Bigger companies, more boardrooms, less snowboarders at the top of the industry.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: There are still snowboarders there, but they have less power.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then At the same time,
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: you've got the Olympic cycle starting to dominate the external financial interests
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: in the sport.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: So you start to see if you go and look at who gets the bulk
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: of non-endemic sponsorship and it's the three medalists in each discipline from
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: the last Olympic cycle.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: By non-endemic, you mean outside of the industry?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: So Audi, automotive, those kind of things, not industry.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, got it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all of those huge,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: huge sponsorship deals just go to the Eileen Goos,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: to the Sean Whites, anyone who's meddled previously.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Rather than companies dipping their toe in snowboarding every year, they now...
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Dip their toe in for six months,
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: three months prior and three months post Winter Olympics with just the medalists.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the sport is poorer, would be my first big statement.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: The core sport is poorer for its Olympic involvement.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: But it has a stronger identity, if that makes sense.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's compartmentalised the Olympic side of things.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: And even though it's on less money,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: it's cleaned out a lot of the fluff that was kind of hanging around.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: And now you have core snowboarders and core snowboard brands back at the heart of it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: Working things like natural selection.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, there's X Games and Snow League.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that's all very new on the competitive landscape.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll have to see where that lands.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: But the rich part of the culture where people are filming,
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: where people are really looking at the way people snowboard,
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: the equipment that we use,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: that feels more diverse and richer than ever to me at the moment.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: You have small companies like Karua, Amplid.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: You have bigger brands.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Burton have always been there.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: They put a lot of money into their kit.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: But Salomon have this specific snowboard division that's working really hard.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of really good product out there being made well.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's to the benefit of your average snowboarder.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's some really good films being made,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: lovely little series that are representing what snowboarding means to people.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think social media has democratised,
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: taken away those gatekeepers,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: which were the big magazines and filmmakers, Transworld, Snowboarder.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the film side of things, Mac Dog, Standard, Absinthe.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Those guys acted as gatekeepers for who could get through and now you look at some
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: of the riders who can explode without the need for big brand backing or like a tick
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: of approval from one of those singular god makers like Justin Hosnack,
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Bruce D, Mike McIntyre or the Hatchet Brothers.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just on the basis of a few clips that they've shot with their friends and basically
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: and then that will then,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: if that gets enough traction on social media,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: that will get them a sponsorship or invite to an event or, yeah.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think you probably...
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: He may have had a couple of video parts, but I always think of Scott Stevens, Sleepy Stevens.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you've never come across him,
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: go and look him up on Instagram as one of the guys who really did that.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And he did have some big film parts,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: but he realised that social media gave him the opportunity to explore and indulge
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: in this completely different form of snowboarding that
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: a big film production probably wouldn't let him do.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: And he was able to chase...
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: This incredibly strange,
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: almost the closest thing snowboarding has to Rodney Mullen,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think, in that sort of, I'm going to go and explore the weird things you can do.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Put one screw in your binding bolt.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that you can shove at the board.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: You can spin the board around the bottom of the binding.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of one foot tricks.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Tricks using trampolines or just weird balance tricks.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's beautiful.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we need.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: The more you have people exploring these different limitations, the better it is for the sport.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because the more it will appeal to more creative people.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: The Olympics quashes everything.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: The spontaneity and the creativity in the sport, despite the judges' best efforts.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: And there is a lot of work going in by the federations and the judges,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: the athletes themselves, coaches, to try and maintain that degree of creativity.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: But it's very, very difficult in structured competition, I think.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And organizing events in Italy also brings some challenges with it,
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: right, in terms of getting some of the things there.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: I remember world championships that we organized back around 2000,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: 2001 in Zapata, and yeah, that was not easy in terms of those commitments.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: I understand that was one of the problems with the big air course or
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: the slope course that didn't get to do a proper practice run
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: the organisers didn't do a proper practice run and so the course builder
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: that would have built the course said okay well then I'm out.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many different layers to it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: There was excellent snowmaking conditions in November,
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: but I think the budgets, as they do with all Olympics, were blowing out.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: So Lavinio hadn't been given the check to start the snow machines blowing,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: and they blew a phenomenal amount of snow in the end, but they blew it very late.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Larks, just over the border,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: an hour and a half northwest,
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: had blown,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think, 90% of the snow they needed for all of their snow parks in November.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: But there was no check for that.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: So the snow was blown really late.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: There was no test event.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: So all of the original designs for a very creative course were jettisoned.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: They built a tunnel under the wrong jump.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: They built it under the second jump, not under the third jump on the course.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that changed the angles and the geometry.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the background.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: There wasn't enough funding released early enough to get the course in and test it properly.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Then you had very abnormal weather conditions that meant
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: that you saw very warm temperatures,
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: which for the men, they can kind of get through more mass.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: They can carry a bit more speed.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: But for the women,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: especially when you have some of those Japanese riders,
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Anagasa, the Austrian rider, they're in the kind of late 40s, early 50 kgs.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like feathers once they're airborne.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And when they land,
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: if they're not in exactly the right spot,
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: then carrying speed to the next jump is a real issue.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: So you had all of that as background.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then the judges watched training and 360s and 720s looked like
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: the biggest tricks or the normal tricks we were going to see.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: But as the course ran in, so they set their scale.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: There is a thinking,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: and this is allegedly, I don't want any comeback on this, so let's use that word.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Allegedly, what happened was...
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's a thing around optics where no one wants to,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: or rather fists don't want to see someone win an Olympic gold medal with
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: a 75 point score.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: So in those conditions where you've only got a 360 or a 720 possible,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: the judges will change the score.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll sit the scale, okay, the scale needs to go up, right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: So they would have,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: where a 360 would score in the,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: like on sector by sector,
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: each individual obstacle being judged,
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: maybe a 50 and a 720 might score, or that would even be higher.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: Might even be a four.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it's an out of 10.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: So a 360 might score a four.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: 720 might score a six at the highest.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because you know you've got to have a 900, a 1080, a 1260, 1440 all catered for in there.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: So they bumped that scale up.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that meant when the course ran in and got faster and you started seeing 1080s,
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: then 1260s and then triple cork jumps, the scale was broken.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: They had nowhere to go.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: They were midway through the second run in the women's slope style
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: and they'd maxed out the second jump score.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: So then they start borrowing points from the overall composition.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, I need another point and a half chucked in there.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: So the point did come.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: I did check this with the judges.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: The point came, but the system was broken by then.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And they were at sea, I think is the fair way to put it.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: And there were too many questions.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think the result was very close to right.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't have changed much.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: But obviously,
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: if you were trying to tell the story and you were picking apart the scores as
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: a commentator like us, it looked broken.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And you couldn't tell that story.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you start asking questions.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then the controversy starts.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you guys are very considered in terms of taking your time,
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: figuring out, okay, what are we going to say?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: We need to say something,
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: we think,
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: but don't want to be too reactive or Todd Richards style,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: just basically blow it all up,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: lob the grenades and everyone else can deal with the aftermath.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Todd's style is not my style.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I understand the frustration after so long,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: because for me,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: a part of it,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: it's a respect to the sport that the organization don't care enough about the sport
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: to ensure after almost 30 years that they get that shit right.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and that's the thing, because there's enough people in the room.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: That know all that stuff,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: that know the factors,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: that know what you need to do to organise a perfect event, to have perfect judging.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: So why can't this happen?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: And the judges,
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: to the judges' credit,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: 18 months, sector by sector judges had sat in the same positions.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: So season in,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: season out,
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: comp in, comp out, they had seen all of those runs developing towards the Olympics.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: They knew what should have gone down,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: but all of those pre-factors were the Symptoms and rather were the cause and then
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: the judging criteria in that last moment was the symptom that showed itself
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: and got lasered by the critics.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I understand Todd's reaction.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: I do.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a part of me that likes it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: I like that he goes in two-footed, Roy Keane style, just smash it up.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think my sadness with it is that if you're Zoe,
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: you're Kokomo or you're Mari, that Controversy Master medal.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that isn't fair because they rode their hearts out in horrible conditions.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: A competition that's not going to let you show your best.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: You're still battling it out.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's hard.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's fair.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, fully agreed there.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So coming back to the question,
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: is it skateboarding that's done the best or that you would say,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: okay, has come away the least harmed from the Olympic embrace?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Mountain biking, BMX, mountain biking's already in there.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Mountain biking hasn't shown its best.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's all cross-country kind of stuff, right?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: Cross-country is so easy because it fits the higher, faster, stronger model.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think...
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: What is it?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just higher, faster.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: I should know that after 10 Olympics.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of the values, the Olympic values?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think theoretically that's what they're testing, isn't it, right?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's the uneasy relationship with action sports.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: Surfing,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: has got in,
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: if that builds the model for free ride,
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: skiing and snowboarding, they have a weather window.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: They go to incredible spots.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Japan was growing pains.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Skateboarding, I don't...
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's there.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: Jury's out on skateboarding for me.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think the street does work, but it's so far away from what skateboarding is to skateboarders.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: But I'd argue the same maybe with snowboarding.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who does 1980s?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: But what we did see, what I don't think you could argue with...
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Is that we saw, okay, the slope was dreadful.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Pound for pound, we saw the best men's halfpipe final ever at the Olympics.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you had a shit show of a slope, and then you had the best men's halfpipe final of all time.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you couldn't have written a better script.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm still getting goosebumps thinking about that.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: That was exquisite for me.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: The drama.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of people, like, the pipe is the downhill for skiing or mountain biking.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's our super pipe is the equivalent.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's the men's 100 metres, right, at the Olympics, essentially.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that was brilliant.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe, and, yeah, the...
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: My two favorite events are men's super pipe and women's slope style
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: because you're seeing the five or six top athletes.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: And there are when they're all there, there are five or six who can do it.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: And they're all pulling the sport in different directions.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And women's slope, you've got very different rotations, very different rails being explored.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Men's pipe, you've got so many different access and tricks still.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: This far down the track being explored with Camelville Ives turning up and doing all
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: of those different like rodeo alley-oop switch double variations.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: Scotty James experimenting with switch backside 16s and then still
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: the big hitting down the pipe toe edge 1440s from
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yuki.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: I want to say Yuki Kodono.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember his name.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's terrible.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: I've got total blank.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: But the...
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think... Maybe skate has that with street, but it's not pound for pound.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: They're not the best street skaters in the world.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Street skating in its classic setting of kind of video parts is not represented by
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: the insane consistent... Actually, maybe Niger's there.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the insane consistency you need for...
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: So competitive world skate competitions and the sort of sterile rails
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: that you hit are at odds with that creativity and the way you find this odd spot
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: and turn it into something that no one's seen.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: You can come out of the bowl and up onto the shelf that basically is not part of
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: the design at all or the back rail or whatever.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, or there's a weird brick bank that means that the run
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: into this spot is insanely difficult.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got to find a way around that.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: Or there's a brilliant run out that gives you another element to the trick or...
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually a normal barrier,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: but it's the way you exit off that barrier and have got to navigate your way across
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: a canal onto another deck.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's those weird things that real life pops up that you can't replicate.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think Paris and the way they approached the games as a whole could have built,
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: they could have gone off the map and built a mobile map.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Street skate contest around Paris.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: We'd have kind of guerrilla spots popping up.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: If they'd really embraced that the city is the venues, which was beautiful.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was by far the best Olympics I've ever been to.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: It was magical in the way they didn't have these sterile stadiums.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: You went to these stunning landmarks.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: And London 2012 had tried it, but I think Paris got a lot closer to it.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: If they'd have used street skateboarding in that way to immerse it In
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: the city's history and heritage, which it has so much, it would have been perfect.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: But instead, we got a beautiful venue, but it was very Olympic.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: You've been around snow sports now for a super long time.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: When you started,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: were you aware,
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: were you consciously building a CV,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: for want of a better word,
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: or were you just basically saying yes to opportunities,
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: were you just taking a chance and blagging your way into things?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: How was it working back in the early days?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's...
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Total honesty.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: I remember being about 13 or 14 and thinking, I want to be famous.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose it's the equivalent of a kid today saying, I want to be a YouTuber.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I had that in me.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it's embarrassing to admit,
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think now, because, but it was, I liked the sound of my own voice.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like I had something to say.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: And
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think through my family,
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: my grandparents, parents taught me and my brothers and sister taught me.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: We were an enthusiastic, passionate family.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: The whole family, like my grandparents were into sailing.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: My dad was into motorbikes and cars and sailing.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they built a dry ski slope close to the house.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: And he was like, right.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: He'd seen Ski Sunday, the BBC show.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: And he's like, right, we're all going skiing.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: We sort of made,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: you made things happen and I had this passion and energy for things
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: and skateboarding and snowboarding put themselves in front of me
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: and offered this opportunity and it was a total accident.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'd I tried to front flip off a bar in Val d'Isère the night before a big air contest.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: And x-rays would later suggest that I broke my neck at the time without any money.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: And thinking I just had a sore neck and I was going to wait and ride it out.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the next day I went up and emceed this big air competition and I really enjoyed it.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: I liken those early days where you've just got a crowd and a microphone.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's like stand up with a safety net because you can test out ideas,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: say what you like,
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: shout some random offensive stuff, or roast people, good friends that you knew.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: You're roasting them, but you've always got the action to fall back on.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: So if something didn't land,
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: if it wasn't funny,
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: if no one got it,
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then you just come back and quickly start talking about the action.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Describing what's happening rather than actually freestyling.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, talk about the formats, the judges, the scores, but you can test out this material.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I would call that period,
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: that emceeing period from,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: I first did that in 1995 through to about 98, 99, my university.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: In broadcasting and events.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Starting to understand how events were built,
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: the running orders, how you tell a story to this crowd in front of you.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of times that was in a period when snowboarding had a lot of money.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: It was starting to find inner city events.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're emceeing one of those,
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: you're in front of a crowd who might be their first time seeing snowboarding in
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: the flesh.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you had to explain...
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Without alienating the athletes and the core that you're who's the credibility,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: you rely on having credibility with them to be reemployed.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: But you've got to let the mainstream audience understand what's going on.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that was critical for me.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: Without those years in the trenches doing the live events, I wouldn't have made it onto the BBC.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: But you were getting those gigs by actually organizing the events themselves
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: or being involved with that?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or were you actually, hey, I'm a freelance emcee, commentator, hype man, book me?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or how were you getting those gigs back then?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: No, I did.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: So the first gig I did that big air was the British Championships.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I started realizing that I wasn't, I was a terminally mediocre pro.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: I had designs on being a great pro.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: But by 97, and I had done a couple of, I'd competed in a couple of Brits.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: But then I realized that I was, I started getting knee injuries, I wasn't going to be the best.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: And People started asking me just at the British Championships to do a bit more and a bit more.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I started doing a bit more of the emceeing and then I broke my knee.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think subconsciously I knew that that was I'd maybe let
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: that happen slightly somewhere deep down because I wanted
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: to start using my brain more.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was windsurfing instructing in the summers and then just coasting.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'd managed to put enough money together windsurfing instructing and then working
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: in snowboard shops in the autumn to then not have to work December to April.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I was finding a few things to duel around.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to keep that winter free to try and focus on snowboarding
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: but actually I was partying too much.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was...
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was kind of getting a bit too loose and I broke my knee as a result of
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: that not looking after myself and that gave me an in to journalism.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'd been writing about the adventures I was having for some of the mags and
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: the moment I started doing the magazine,
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was going out and doing comp reports and I wasn't in a rider capacity.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: So people started handing me the mic more and that.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I was there.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't a professional thing.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was just I was the right person there.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was the best option who was there.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're in Europe,
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: a lot of times,
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's an odd thing,
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: but in Europe especially,
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: they feel like it legitimizes the competition if you've got
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: an English language speaker.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: Even if you're in France.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: A native English, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like either a Brit or I think probably more a Brit rather than American voice.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: They would have taken Americans if they could get them,
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: but very few people are regularly on that side of the Atlantic.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it made sense in all the comps I did in Sweden and Norway.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: The Scandinavian comps, everyone spoke English and it was wonderful.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: You'd have a great rapport there.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: In France, Switzerland and Austria, there was a high level of English, but I was embarrassed.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: I had a little bit of French I could get by and mess around with,
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: but Italy,
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was always so embarrassed in Italy because the crowd had nothing usually.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: You were commentating for the riders at that stage.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: But...
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: It grew steadily.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: And by 2001, 2002, I was doing little bits of TV and almost every major snowball competition.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Style, US Open, The Battle, O'Neill Evolution, the SB Jam, everything that was out there.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Those core events then for a core audience rather than real mainstream broadcasts.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: So was that first BBC then?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was that the first USA mainstream?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: No, I hadn't had any mainstream at that stage.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think X Games went to Barcelona in about 2004 and I got called in to do
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: the commentary on that.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that was when it was still Grandstand,
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: which was a sort of four hour long Saturday afternoon sports show.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: And they did this foray into X Games and they just didn't know how to cover it.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't understand any of it.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it was chaos.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was a really bad representation and it burned their fingers, I think.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing came back after that far.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Until the Olympics in 2006 was when there was a guy commentated in 2002 on
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: the Olympics for the BBC who really didn't know what he was doing.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd established myself enough by that stage.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd got my first regular TV gig.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: I had one in 2001 for the Turner Broadcasting Corporation, Ted Turner.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: He'd got...
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: CNN for the news and he got to Cartoon Network for the kids.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he had an idea that he could do CNX would be a tweens and teens channel.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: And they were doing focus groups around London to see what would hit with those people.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we got called as the action sports guys.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'd got an emceeing company at that stage with
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: an American guy called Christian Stevenson that we called Laughing Gear.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we would run, if you needed an action sports MC crew, we'd do that.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: We had a radio show on Wednesday nights called The Rock Copter above a pub in Fulham.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Marianne Faithfull was a regular in the pub downstairs.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: We used to get her upstairs.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about what was it.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: I still can't believe we did this.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: God rest Marianne Faithful's soul.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: We used to get her in to talk about what would make a good penis.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: You've seen a few, Marianne.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we just had fun with stuff.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we'd cover a lot of different avenues.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: We'd be doing vert ramps,
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: big festivals like V Festival, Monsters of Rock, Donington, Reading and Leeds.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: We do all of these.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: If they had a vert ramp there,
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: we'd perfected the art of making action sports palatable to mainstream audiences,
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: making it fun.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so we got called in for this focus group.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: And about two weeks later,
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: the guy who'd run the focus group,
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: who was a mate,
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: was like, look, I showed it to everyone and you guys have got the gig.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it was three days a week in London and it allowed me to cut my teeth as
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: a TV presenter, knock off all the corners.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you're just in front of a camera doing links, pre-recorded links.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it's...
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's TV with training wheels, really,
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: because you just get used to speaking to a lens and remembering lines
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: and working out how best to structure things so you can do it naturally.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do you read verbatim off a script and memorize that?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: Or do you just give yourself three bullet points that you go,
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: OK, I need to get from here to here and say these things in between?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we did a year of that and it got ditched.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: See, Turner broadcasting like this doesn't work.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: But then in that time, some friends from Wales had set up free sports on four.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: One of the first...
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: One of the first ad-funded broadcasting models.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: So they got a half-hour slot with Channel 4 on Sunday mornings,
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: and they went out and sold that to events around the UK.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: So Red Bull would buy three slots and say,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: okay, we'll do three degrees, the BMX comp will do, Masters of Dirt will do this.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: So we'd go and do,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: we did the Coldwater Classic for O'Neill, but that got me covering sport on TV.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: In sort of broadcast territory that I was familiar with and felt like I had some agency with.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I built up, we won an RTS award for coverage of different action sports.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was really good grounding and foundation in TV.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I worked,
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: I started, again,
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: I was looking at how people were organising competitions and how we fitted in as
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: a broadcaster.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Just so many things.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's such a long convoluted answer, isn't it?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: But the short way of looking at it is that I was coming in.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'd had in between all of this,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: between probably 99 and 2002, I'd set up an event management company with friends.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it went bankrupt pretty quickly.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: We hitched our wagon to a music festival and ran the snowboard on the side of that.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: And we were very naive, not commercially savvy, but extremely passionate.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: And we learned an awful lot through that, but ultimately got our fingers quite badly burned.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was a scaffolding event kind of thing, or what sort of event was it?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was called Union Event Management, and we ran...
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Very good grassroots events.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: So our biggest success with it,
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: we built the AIM series, which stood for artificial indoor and mountain.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we built a grassroots snowboard tour that came from dry slopes,
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: indoor snow domes, out to the British Championships in the mountains.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we built a really well-branded, coherent...
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Grassroots series that took you up to the Brits that would then in theory launch you
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: into the European competitions and then up to the mainstream.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I will still credit the rapid success of riders like Billy Morgan,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: Sparrow Knox,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Jamie Nichols and even at its tail end Mia Brooks with coming through that system.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: But then we started trying to run bigger events.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I look at now, going back, one of my many roles is running an events production company.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: And looking at how naive we were, I'm amazed that it lasted the three, four years that it did.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: But it was the commercial side of it.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: It looked to us like there was a lot of money flowing around in the sport at that time.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we just didn't quite have...
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think we could build the trust.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: And or instilled trust in big brands for them to start writing the six-figure checks
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: which we saw out there.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: If we'd have set our sights smaller and built more organically,
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: we maybe would have had more success.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: But we tried to run before we'd walked, I think.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Hindsight's always a fine thing, right, with those sorts of ventures.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: And also what you learn later on in terms of what you know through
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: that professional evolution that you've gone through.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, my wife would call it a nervous breakdown.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was rocking in the bath one night at how much money was going out
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: and how little was coming in.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: And learning to say no from that was massive.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that was actually over the course of a decade,
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: but that was the beginning of it, saying yes too much and taking too much on.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then finding your limit physically and mentally,
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: which as a freelancer, I think is the constant conundrum.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm there now.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: I've said yes to a few too many things,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: but the early warning signs are there and I've got the bandwidth and experience
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: to be able to deal with it.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: And if I look back on the happiest professional and personal periods,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: they're the ones where I've said no more often.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do you know that?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do you know at the time in terms of, okay,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: this is in the no category,
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: this is a maybe,
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: this is a yes, or depending on everything else that I've got going on currently?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's the thing,
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: I look at the various things that you've got going on and there's a lot,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: but it's also, it's a lot that's extremely variable.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not like, okay, it's Tuesday, this is happening.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, you don't know, a lot of that's going to be weather dependent.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: That might change entirely within 24 hours.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you manage that for yourself?
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's having more experience.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think the key thing that I've...
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: One of the most important things I've learned is that even though it looks on
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: the surface like everything you do is quite individual...
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: The greatest successes and the work I'm most proud of have come from brilliant teams.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it's working with people that you really trust and who you understand and understand you.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: When I first moved down here to New Zealand,
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was in the back of my mind to start building something.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't even sure what that was.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: Was it going to be a media production company?
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: Would it be events production?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Would it be something much bigger?
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: Would I just run something small on my own?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I took a lot of time and looked at a lot of different options, but it was actually...
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: Teaming up with Sophie Luther,
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: someone who has a very different skill set to me that made the most sense.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: She's so good at all the things I'm not good at.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: She's also really good at a lot of the things I am good at.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: But critically,
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: the working relationship looked like Sophie full time with me a quarter or a third
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: or sometimes half time.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: Every now and again full time.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: But It's such a brilliant working relationship and it's called All Good Productions.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's a broad ranging production company.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: We do little content gigs or we do big event gigs.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: But the way Soph works,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: she's incredibly capable,
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: Swiss Army Knife, who's a weapon with a spreadsheet and loves the details.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: Can run a budget and it lets me do a lot more of the conceptual kind of ideas based stuff.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll run,
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: there's a few areas that,
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: whether it's contacts,
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: whether it's sort of building broadcast teams,
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: there's areas that I do, but having that freedom to work the way we do is magical.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Did you figure that out organically or was there a plan at the beginning
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: where you said, okay, no, this is how it's going to work?
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Or was that a sort of process of evolution to get where you are now in terms of how that rolls?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was organic.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: There was a little bit of chat about it.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: But as we started, we got a pretty big project straight off the bat.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: We met through winter games down here and really liked the way each other worked.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: We'd been running the broadcast, marketing and comms side of things.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that was really making a lot of sense.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we were like, okay, there's something here.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: We can do this.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then Soph's got really deep ties in mountain biking.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: And through the connection between Travis Rice and Rod Drury,
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: the natural and natural selection where I intersected,
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: we started to look at,
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Travis Rice and Rod Drury, I haven't quite made that sprint jump yet.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: They'd made that connection themselves.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: The two of them?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: They'd started to talk to each other.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then because I was down here and working on natural selection,
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: it was like, okay, that triangle started to develop.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it was very, that was lovely.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was really organic.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: That was like, okay, there's something here.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: Rod wanted to make something happen for Queenstown.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: Travis was looking to expand natural selection beyond just snowboarding.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: You're already working with Travis in the snowboarding natural selection tour, right?
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: So we started, Rod,
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: I took Sophie and I was like, okay,
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: I need someone with your contact book around the Southern Lakes and understanding
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: of budgets and consent and processes down here to help me see if this is possible.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: And Rod came in with blue sky thinking like, okay, I'd like to make this happen.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: What's it going to take?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: And together we started to...
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: Work out what that could be, where it would happen and what it would look like.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: All good for me was very much a product of my existing working model collapsing during COVID.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: For anyone freelance, that was quite a nerve-wracking time.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: And no matter how big and successful you look on the outside, I'm sure you know it.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: As a freelancer, you're only a couple of jobs away.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Starting to look through the back of the paper and the job market.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: So you're like, okay.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was impressed with how the action and adventure sport kind
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: of media landscape did rally through COVID.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: There were small intermittent jobs and the BBC were fantastic.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: We were Ski Sunday, my potboiler job through January, February.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Which you've been doing since 2006?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: 2007.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: Celebrated 20 years in January, February this year on that show.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we were the only.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Shemi, my co-host, was in France, so I could travel through Europe.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: And if you had MIQ, remember Managed Isolation Quarantine.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: Unbelievably, I did two trips out during that period.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: And unbelievably,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: there were lapses in the queue for MIQ at the times I was offered both trips,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: the Tokyo Olympics and Ski Sunday.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you could slot back in or you couldn't get in?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: No, I got slots within a week of those jobs ending and I was able to get in and out.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: Chris Kirkham, aka Zoid, the cameraman for Ski Sunday, who was for a long time my work husband.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_02: A brilliant, brilliant cameraman who I trusted and did such good work for the BBC.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: He became their Ski Sunday,
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: their Winter Olympic,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: then their Summer Olympic,
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: then their Commonwealth,
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: then their Wimbledon, then bits of F1, and then he branched out from there.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: He's just a Incredible features, cameraman, but we got out of it.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: He lives in the Mount,
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: or he did, he's moved to Europe now with the sort of collapse of terrestrial media.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: He's gone closer to the source now, like a lot of people in film and TV.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: But at the time he was based in New Zealand and we left New Zealand,
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_02: Shemi Alcott left France and we based ourselves in Larkes in Switzerland
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: where they had exceptional,
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: they had the kind of financial backing you need
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: to implement exceptional Covid controls that the BBC were happy with.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we ran Ski Sunday that season as a three-person crew.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: From Lark's.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: Out of three apartments in Lark's.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: We were socially isolating in these apartments because you couldn't risk
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: at any point one of us going down and infecting the other two.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And we were the only BBC production happening out of Manchester,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: out of Media City, let alone out of the UK.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was their preference, I think, wasn't it at the time?
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, okay,
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: you guys can come in here and we'll shoot it in studio and we'll just basically...
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: And you'll isolate in Media City and we'll just create a bubble for this crew.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, no, it doesn't work like that.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we had... Well,
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: theoretically it could have,
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: but it wouldn't have been a lot
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: of fun for you guys, right?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know where I would rather be at Larkes or Manchester.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we had the option.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: We'd be like, we've got the option here.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: The eyes of the BBC are on us.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_02: Can these people manage this?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Can they be trusted?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: Can you run a show?
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Ten days in, I hit a tree stump and wrapped my knee around it.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: I broke the tibial plateau, snapped the MCL and the ACL clean and dislocated the kneecap.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we made a decision between the series producer and us that we would keep that on
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: the down low.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I was braced up.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: We shot all the links from that point on from around the main galaxy building at
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: the top of the cable car so I could get to it.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: I had surgery just before the...
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh no, I had it just after the penultimate show.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I had three days recovery and then we got up to the highest point we could
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_02: on snow with this throbbing leg.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Having not told head office at all that this is all we see.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think head office.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know whether the heads knew,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: but the series producer knew, but we got the whole series away and then I...
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: I had quite an enjoyable MIQ back in New Zealand.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember the name of the hotel, but it overlooks the race course in Rotorua.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: It was a pretty 70s,
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: maybe 80s hotel, but it had a hot tub piped from the thermal water up onto the deck.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I could see the race course from the deck,
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: so I could elevate my foot in this hot tub and get the TAB up.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was only betting a dollar or two.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I did my physio every day.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: Did a couple of podcasts with people and I would have been doing physio anywhere else.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: But it was, yeah, that was, that one was manageable.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: But it was, yeah, it's, we've got every season of Ski Sunday away for 20 years.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Come hell or high water.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we, I think we proved then what we could do with the show and what it means to people.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: And the Winter Olympics is always an extension of that show.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I tried very hard.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think I arrived maybe a little too late,
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: but I tried to build the same model in New Zealand with Winter Games.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: I said, look,
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: you can wrap an arm around that mainstream snow community because it is
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: a big community and the culture is so rich with snow.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: I truly believe it's one of the only pastimes,
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: like beyond sport, Where you can get three generations doing it for the whole day.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_02: Name me another sport where you can have kids, parents and grandparents doing it.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: Tennis, yes, you can do it, but a couple of hours, everyone's shattered.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you do go to the tennis courts and hang out for the day.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_02: Golf, pretty close,
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: but you're still not active together,
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: enjoying the same thing, but getting what you need from it.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: Where the grandparents are sight skiing,
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: the parents might be with the grandparents, the parents might be chasing the kids.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: The kids are ripping around going absolutely nuts.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then you all meet up on the chair or you all go down to the cafe.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: You have a barbecue in the car park, whatever, however you do it.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's very few things where everyone can do it.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: And Ski Sunday, the audience figures prove that.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_02: It is destination viewing for families and the messages we get.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, so similar to my own experiences where the parents are like,
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_02: right, we're going to go and do this.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: It shows people who don't come into contact with the mountains,
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: this environment that gives them something that they never could have dreamed of.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: the power of an alpine environment to broaden horizons literally
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: and metaphorically is unrivaled.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: How long did it take you before you felt really comfortable in that role?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's like because I can imagine it's like because that is I mean,
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: BBC is the establishment and to come from,
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know, from from a core sport and but to be aspiring to get into the
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're under a lot of pressure in that situation.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're the freak who's flying the flag high internally.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: You're a different exotic fruit compared to everybody else internally.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: How long did that take before you started to, or are you not yet there?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is there still you sort of feel that, you know?
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: you've got the intersection of
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: You've described brilliantly there two different facets of what makes anyone good, I think.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: You've got that precocious almost arrogance when you come into a role
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_02: that You can do something and the people there don't know.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: They don't know how to do it.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: They don't know snowboarding.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: So from my side, I came in as this precocious, arrogant snowboarder.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: You don't know how to cover snowboarding.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the experienced, measured broadcaster.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: You can,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: well I say broadcaster,
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: the experience and the understanding,
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: the mastery of a profession that only comes with your Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you...
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: I arrived in 2006 at the Olympics and I described it to a friend at the time
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: as like blowing dust off people in the NBC, which is the Mountain Broadcast Centre.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: You have two hubs at the Winter Olympics.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: The IBC down in the city, which would be Turin in 2006.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: It would be Sochi in Russia.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_02: It would be Pyongyang in Korea.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: Then you have the NBC, which is the Mountain Broadcast Centre.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's up where they're doing.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be interesting in France to see where they put that because it's lots of different areas.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: But in Turin, it was up in this, where was it?
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: Sestria.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I went in there and it was just a load of,
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: it was a load of old people that I didn't see as having any connection
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_02: to winter sport, let alone snowboarding.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I was right,
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: they didn't have a connection to winter sport,
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: but the expertise in creating mainstream shows,
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: those stunning openers and closers,
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: the really, if you watch the World Cup from 2026, the quality of the edits we got.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: Here comes my wife, loudest voice in the world, TM.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: I don't.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's like having some kind of aura.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell where my wife is on the mountain just by listening.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: You've got that.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: We were talking about the quality of highlights edits now that you generally get
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: from sporting events is dreadful.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's the one thing you go back to the BBC and think 2006 before
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_02: the digital revolution had started.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of stuff still analog shot on tapes.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_02: The level of expertise required to keep an Olympics live from a remote mountain broadcast hub.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: I just didn't understand any of that.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: All I saw was you're not going to represent my sport properly.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here to do it properly.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: You watch me go.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Which went down like a cup of cold sick with those experienced professionals
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: who were having the dust blown off them or how welcoming and gracious were they
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: at this precocious newcomer that come into their midst?
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: The behind-the-scenes crew were, that's a lovely word, gracious.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: They were incredibly gracious with this young upstart.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: Claire Balding,
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: the BBC's sort of figurehead for live broadcasting,
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: an incredible savant when it comes to broadcasting.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's immense.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: But...
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: She, after one of the snowboard broadcasts, she,
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: I could hear in my headphones,
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: she said, okay,
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: and now back to the real sports,
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: which was a dagger through the heart at the time,
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: because you're,
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: no matter how much you see yourself as a core sport on that stage,
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: you're looking, you are looking for acceptance.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_02: You want the sport to do itself justice and to be considered alongside the downhill
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: and figure skating and to be a part of that family.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that hurt at that time,
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_02: but there was a moment In there, really, really pivotal moment for me.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_02: I knew from what I described earlier is that university period of doing live events
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_02: and learning how to describe my sports to mainstream audiences.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: I knew I could do that.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I was on, it was the, I think it was the Snowboard Cross first, new event in Turin in 2006.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I had a producer sat next to me and we had to get up and get on buses.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have a car or anything.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: We were at the bottom of the pile.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: We had to get on buses at 3.45 to get from Sestria to Bardoneckia for the snowboard events.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: And we'd do two or three buses through the main stops to get there at 7.30am and
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: then I'd have two hours to go through the media centre,
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: get all of the sheets and get all of my notes together.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: And we sat down and we started doing the racing and I started getting excited.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the producer was like trying to make these calm down gestures at me while we were going.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like,
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: I remember looking across and going,
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: just making a little face at her and going, we're going for this.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I just kept winding up.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: And after that moment, I got, I think it was a couple of events after that.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'd made my decision.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing this my way, whether it works or not.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I got called in by an editor, lovely man, Charlie Cope.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the BBC, an editor is like a director.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: They're making the editorial,
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: they're not just stitching stuff together with the director telling them,
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: they're making the editorial calls.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: And Charlie was one of the most experienced,
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: but a lovely,
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: gentle, soft-spoken man who understood what was, how things might change.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_02: He had a really open mind.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he took me into one of the back rooms after...
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: Two or three broadcasts and he said come and have a look at this and the BBC is
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: a publicly funded broadcaster so they have to respond to anyone who writes to them
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_02: because they're essentially publicly owned by the license fee payer and he had
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_02: a folder on this computer out the back just filled with all of the audience emails
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: so he took me to a The snowboarding folder.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_02: And Letty said, have a read of these.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it makes me a little bit emotional now.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was just, you don't get that.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose you do get it now.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: You can see the replies.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_02: But it was like validation of what I'd thought there.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_02: This risk I'd taken.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'd been given the BBC opportunity.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'd decided to do it my way.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was this stack of emails going, oh my
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: God, give us more
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: of this.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: We love this.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Who's this guy?
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: What's happening?
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like...
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, John.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: From punters or from core snowboarders people?
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: Punters.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was getting text messages from mates like, oh my God, it's blowing up.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: Snowboarding was going somewhere where no one had thought it could go in the UK.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: So it was, yeah, that was beautiful.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that gave me the confidence.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: I got it wrong in Vancouver.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_02: I got a friend in.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: They started giving me a bit more license, asking if I wanted guests in.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: Based on the success of 2006?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: 2006, and I'd been invited on Ski Sunday in 2007.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_02: And after a couple of teething problems in 07 and 08,
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_02: I started to find my feet there and build some ownership.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_02: The BBC gave us a Top Gear style spin-off series in 09, which broadcasts in...
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: So we had Ski Sunday, the Olympics in Vancouver and this high altitude spin-off series.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: This was the you travelling the world doing the cool shit
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: that you basically figured out,
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: hey, this would be fun to do, but I haven't got the budget to do it myself.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the BBC started the second season of Ski Sunday.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_02: I said to them after the first one, I said, look, can you give me a bit of money?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I came down to New Zealand, did a piece on snow park, a ski resort that's just a snow park.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then I said,
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_02: New Zealand's one of those rare countries you can go skateboarding,
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_02: surfing and snowboarding in a day.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I did those two films and took them back to the BBC and they said, these are brilliant.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: Can you do more of these?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I wrote a list in 2007, the end of 2007.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_02: I stole an idea off a mate.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: I said, I want to go from Moscow to Novokuznetsk on the Siberian Express and go
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_02: to Siberia's most remote resorts.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because Putin at the time was giving mining permits to anyone who built a ski resort.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted to build a domestic ski industry.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_02: So there were these insane mining towns involved.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: Eight hours train from anywhere with ski fields.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_02: It was one of the most insane trips.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_02: We went sandboarding in Morocco,
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_02: climbed Mount Atlas,
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_02: tested all the new powder snowboard designs that were coming out,
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: sort of rocket board, tapered board, old school swallowtails with helicopters.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, did all of these amazing films.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: Went and did Japan, just showed people how...
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_02: That crazy Japanese powder system worked.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_02: Did a lot of incredible films.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: But that was building confidence and letting me understand mainstream broadcasting.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it didn't hit.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: Some of it did.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: High Altitude didn't hit.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: It was of its time.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was a very blokey challenge show.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I rue that the opportunity came so quickly.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_02: If we'd have waited and I could have...
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: If someone gave me...
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: An hour-long slot on Primetime BBC,
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: which is what we got for High Altitude now, I could make a proper show for it.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_02: But that came too soon.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a little bit reductive and childish.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I say that with all due respect to the producers who are brilliant who put that together.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: But that was just of its age.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we were running that Top Gear style format, I feel, was running its time out at that point.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Are those opportunities finished now in terms of for the sport that was just
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: a unique period of time and constellation of events and processes and opportunities?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think for anything like a terrestrial channel, yes.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: The TVNZs, BBCs,
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_02: SRFs of the world, ABCs, NBCs, they're never going to make a show like that now.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: But what we're seeing is the democratization of that content creation.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want to make, if you made Ski Sunday for YouTube, I think it could work really well.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's a massive market for a mainstream snow show,
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_02: but just not, no one has the advertising budget.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: From terrestrial broadcasters to do that anymore.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_02: They won't take a risk.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: Terrestrial broadcasting is becoming...
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's being reduced now to these awful mainstream reality formats and then bets
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_02: on big sporting events that will return a subscription fee or enough viewers
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_02: to warrant it.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then soap operas.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's like this...
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's like watching the dinosaurs die in slow motion with terrestrial TV.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's so painful.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: The BBC, Ski Sunday may be on the ropes.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_02: We know BBC have got £160 million worth of cuts to make this year.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that Ski Sunday will be part of that conversation.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do you approach it then as a production company?
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: I used to work for a production company in Germany and used
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: to regularly get stressed because I would be trying to convince my bosses
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: that we should be producing our own things.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do you approach that?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: So with an event like Natural Selection Mountain Biking, it's an event that you have a stake in?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's the role of a service provider?
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's an interesting one.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_02: We started off as a stakeholder because we got government funding.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we had a responsibility.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_02: Only New Zealand companies can run that.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the traditional model is that we run with all good.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: Generally, you're an event property.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_02: You bring in the sport and we'll build you the venue.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want a broadcast team and you just lay the sport and your your model over
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_02: the top of that, because everything.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: If you go back and look at something like X Games in its heyday,
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_02: late 2000s,
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: early 2010s,
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_02: they were taking 50,
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_02: 60 people from ESPN around the world to Barcelona,
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_02: to Tokyo, to Tien, to build this uniform model in different places.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's not sustainable anymore.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: You have to have an executive team that you bring in who work with the local team.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: And New Zealand's got it right in that respect.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: If you want government funding,
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: you have to use a certain amount of local talent to make that work.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then you see the government's return on investment in the local community.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: So Snow League, Natural Selection come in.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: If they want government funding, they have to give back to the community.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you'll see a lot of local operators being used in that respect.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a strong model.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: But for all good, we haven't built our own thing.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_02: As an individual, as Ed Lee, I've got a couple of very small things.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_02: We had...
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_02: Winter Olympics in Livigno back on European snow.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_02: So for the BBC it was a big hit again.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_02: You're regularly seeing top five viewing figures in the four to five million range.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: And Tim Warwood and I had five of the top six events for those viewing figures.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like wrapping an arm,
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: taking core snowboarding and free skiing,
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_02: but wrapping an arm around a mainstream audience and showing them what it can be.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: We know that works.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_02: And we delivered the BBC an audience that they crave,
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_02: a younger audience and then returning viewers to their streaming platform,
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_02: iPlayer, who haven't been on the streaming platform in six months.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_02: We delivered those audiences.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_02: I had high hopes again, I thought.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's the first Winter Olympics on a close time zone since Sochi in 2014.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_02: We smashed it, got these big numbers and the trail goes dead for them.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_02: They know those cuts are coming probably and they just don't want to take a risk
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: on these sports.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: So at that point, you're like, okay, we have to do it now.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_02: Even if we only get 10% of that audience, 300, 400,000 people would be vast.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: In a slot for us.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we're chasing that.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we're going to go and have a go at.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_02: So to your question, I'm, what, 30 years?
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: No, 20 years into this,
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_02: since I started messing around with the microphone at live events,
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_02: I've got the confidence to try something on my own.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: And are probably now at the point where you are starting to be seen as
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: the establishment now, right?
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of depending on who you're working with,
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: here's this old dude that knows all about broadcasting rather
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: than this young punk that's going to tell us how it's all going to work.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's maybe a different role in stage for you, right?
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, we talked about it, didn't we?
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_02: The intersection of the precocious arrogance that comes in and then that sort of...
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_02: Expertise and understanding as you spend more time in it.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_02: The crossroads for that was 2014, I think.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_02: A friend messaged me and I have this understanding that I have quite
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_02: a nasal estuary English voice and I was very conscious of that.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_02: He said, oh, it's so lovely to hear your voice.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_02: We were talking about something.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_02: He was the editor of White Lines at the time, Ed Blomfield.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, I said, yeah, it's...
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_02: And he said,
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: Really helped me relax.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, ah, it's,
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_02: I started to understand that it's not about necessarily what you look like,
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_02: how you sound.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's about familiarity.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have that,
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_02: if you, the, the hardest thing in broadcasting is getting enough time to get good.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen two people walk in and be supremely confident.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: And look like they've mastered it straight away.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_02: And one of those was really high on drugs.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really abnormal.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: No one starts.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_02: You can have a lot of confidence, but you're going to get humiliated.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're lucky enough to...
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_02: Build up slowly.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a curse being thrown into a very big show of any kind,
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_02: any medium straight away, because the likelihood of you succeeding is lower.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_02: You almost want this slow, organic build up.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that you can learn your craft so that as you do build a bigger
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_02: and bigger audience, you've got more authority and gravitas.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then by the time I got that,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'd already put in, you can argue I'd put in a decade before I got the Olympics.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_02: If I'd have got the Olympics in 2002, it might not have happened for me.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_02: I might have been too raw and too angry and had too much of a point to prove.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_02: But I got I got given long enough by 2014,
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_02: eight years in to BBC Broadcasting,
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like I was starting to get my head around what was what the role was all
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: about.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly Lavinio, I said a lot less.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_02: And what it meant was I had more time to think about what I said.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: So when I do say something, it's better.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's the best part.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: That was the most magical part of working that out.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh, I can say less, think more and it's better.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Did you feel a sense of responsibility to the sport?
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And did people make you aware of that from the sport?
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember like a lot of early snowboarding footage coverage,
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: particularly I had a huge challenge with this with the domestic broadcasters here,
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_01: was showing people Yeah,
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_01: because that was the spectacular and
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: that was like hey this is extreme sport was how they were presenting it
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: and extreme sport looking at looking at these people doing these ridiculous crashes
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: and it's just like hey you've taken the you know the four crashes of
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_01: the hundred rides and that's what you're showing rather than the amazing tricks
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: that people are landing.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then even if they've taken it The MTV style guy in the sky shot from
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_02: the late 90s where there's no frame of reference.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: The cameraman twists the camera around.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the host broadcasters giving them an absolute pile of rot to work with anyway.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_02: It took me a long time with the BBC and Ski Sunday for a long time was used as this...
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_02: Almost reward for the promising young producers coming up.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we'd get high turnover of producers.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I was trying to teach new people every year these values.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_02: But my biggest ally, he started only a year or two after me, was an editor.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I talked about how important the editor's role was at the BBC.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: They are...
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_02: So key to what coverage goes out.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: And he learned and took the time and would ask me, are these shots okay?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Are we getting it right here?
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been able to...
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's a long journey.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of trust.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt that responsibility,
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_02: but I didn't feel like I had the agency in the early days to really...
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_02: Push that and assert myself.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_02: But by 2012, 2013,
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_02: five, six years in, I was starting to get there and I had a lot more authority.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like I was more a part of the team and producers would come and speak to me.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_02: I've had difficult years.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: For the first time in a long time, there was a series producer change a couple of years ago.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the guy who's there now is an awesome guy.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_02: But we had a bit of a set to because our one,
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Lark's Open, is the only event that kind of falls within the series' run.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it looked like we were going to lose it.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, why am I here?
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what am I doing if we don't have that?
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lose the rights to it?
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_02: What do we do with this?
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: That was the first time I'd really put my foot down.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was really awkward because he'd just come in and he was trying to get his feet
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_02: under the table and he'd inherited a difficult rights deal.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I was probably a little bit too hard on him, but I needed him to understand what it meant.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he maybe...
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_02: We've had the rights every year since.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's the thing.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you come to a role like that,
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: you don't know that, well, okay,
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_01: you'll be looking at those lists of events and the costs associated with acquiring
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: the rights to each of them and some that will be coming as a package
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_01: and you'll be getting three events and this will be one and you won't realise,
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: well, actually, this is the Wimbledon of snowboarding right here.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I can forget about all the others if I don't do this deal because I need to have that.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like if you're coming to it fresh, how are you going to know that?
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_02: and it's...
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's, it's so, so hard on this.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm, I hope we're coming out of the other side of it, but there's so many streaming services.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Now you've got,
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_02: there's this company called Viaplay who've bought bundles of stuff and they,
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember what they're based out of Scandinavia or Benelux,
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_02: but they've bought bundles of sports and And they get the ones they want
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_02: and they get all this other stuff with it and they don't care about
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_02: the bottom end stuff and the Lark's Open is one of those that they've ended up with
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_02: the UK live rights to.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_02: They just won't even answer emails when you try and have a discussion
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_02: about getting highlights right.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_02: They're just not interested.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is just some lowly thing that's getting in the way.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the biggest challenge action and adventure sports face.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Coming back to our Olympic conversation,
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_02: how do you stop the Olympics being the be-all and end-all and
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_02: the only way mainstream audiences and brands get involved?
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: He's getting better coverage, more universal coverage in one place.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's what the UCI and mountain biking got right under Red Bull.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think now under Warner Brothers' discovery and the seemingly endless acquisitions
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_02: that seem to be miring that group.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then the paywall that stuck him under Red Bull,
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_02: you could watch downhill mountain biking with the world's best voices,
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_02: most authoritative voices in Rob Warner,
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Elliot Jackson, Claudio, whoever it was was on those broadcasts.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_02: You knew where it was and you could slot in.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that was one of the best in class, WSL as well.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to watch surfing now, There's great surfing products out there.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_02: There were great mountain biking products out there.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot of it is, I guess, the age of the sport, right?
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: That it's still relatively young and you've got things that are happening compared
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: to a sport like football,
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_01: where it's just like,
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_01: that's the system and here are the rights and there are the organisations and that's
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: who you're I can remember talking to a tech entrepreneur
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_01: in Miami who'd acquired Tom Sims' company back in the late 90s.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And as part of that deal,
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Sims had protected World Snowboarding Championships in North America.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so this guy had bought this...
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the properties was this,
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_01: and we would quite like to organize the World Snowboarding Championships
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_01: in North America, and you can't do it if this guy's got the title to it.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the thing,
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: for a more established sport,
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: you're not having to deal with those sorts of red herrings that
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: then make it very difficult for things like broadcasting.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_02: But then you almost,
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_02: with football,
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_02: you get to the other end of the spectrum where it's a victim of its own success.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_02: And they're selling rights in the UK through four different providers.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_02: So if you want to watch all of the premiership,
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_02: you have to buy Amazon, BT, Sky and God knows what, DAZN or whatever it is.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a mess.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_02: But snowboarding's at the other opposite end of the spectrum where people ask me
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_02: after the Olympics, I've got...
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Streams, I could show you.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_02: We picked up, I think I picked up 15,000, 20,000 followers during the Olympics.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So many people just saying, where do I go?
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_02: How do I get more snowboarding?
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Where can I watch this?
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, so you've got natural selection on Red Bull TV.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's going to happen in a couple of weeks' time.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to Snow League after that.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's on NBC and you might get highlights.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Then I just want to turn it on and be able to watch it.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_02: We've got such...
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's so splayed out now.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_02: You've got Snow League,
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_02: you've got X Games,
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_02: both behind these weird American rights deals,
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_02: which means that you might be able to get them if you're in New Zealand on YouTube,
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_02: because it's not Geoblock, but Europe maybe has a Geoblock.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_02: NST is the only one that's out there, and that's Red Bull TV.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Red Bull TV,
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_02: if they went out and threw the money at it just to get all of the Fist stuff,
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_02: all of the NST stuff,
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_02: all of the Snow League stuff,
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they'd be able to get X Games,
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: but if they got all of that and lumped it together,
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_02: so you knew you're like, right,
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_02: I got a Red Bull for Snow,
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_02: as you did with mountain biking, it would be such, such a masterstroke.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_01: The start of the BBC gig,
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_01: was the point where you and your wife, Sian,
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: decided, okay,
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: maybe start to put a little bit of a toe back in the New Zealand waters
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_01: and establish a base, I think, close to Sian's parents in Auckland initially.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Was that right?
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Back around in the day?
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, so our daughter Suki was born.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, it was.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_02: So Suki was born...
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_02: In August 2006, so just after the Winter Olympics.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_02: And when Sian and I got together in 2001, she'd said to me, look, I'm going back to New Zealand.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_02: Within two months, she didn't want there to be any ambiguity.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_02: So she just said, look.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I was fine.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, yeah, great.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I was so into it.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: Having been to New Zealand at that point?
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, never been.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I came for the first time in 2002.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we just drove around North and South Island in a camper van and saw the whole country.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the romantic thing to say would be I fell in love with it.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_02: That wasn't the reality?
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_02: I fell in love with a holiday.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_02: It was a great holiday.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_02: But in the background there, all the time was... Could I live here?
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_02: How can I make it work here?
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've built this in over the she said four years.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_02: She actually gave me five years in the end.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I was very lucky because she said two months.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_02: I said, give me three or four years to do what I need to do, which I haven't thought about it.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that I said that to her means that I probably were planning.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't understand it at the time, but I probably did have a plan.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I got that.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_02: I never would have dreamed it would have been the BBC, but I did want to be.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'd kind of got the TV presenter thing off the ground.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_02: The BBC had happened.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that gave me, Suki was born in August.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_02: We were living in Brighton, but Suki had been born in New Zealand.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't automatically get Sian's citizenship.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_02: She automatically,
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_02: weirdly,
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_02: I hope this has changed now,
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_02: but you automatically get your father's citizenship, not your mother's.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, um, Sean's mum's a midwife.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we came back.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_02: She was born in New Zealand.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_02: We went back.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_02: We had a house in Brighton in the lanes,
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_02: um, in Hanover Hill, Muesli Mountain, which was close to the train station.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I could get to Gatwick or London.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_02: It was really easy life for me.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_02: And she, I went away to Dallas for one of those.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_02: It was like X Games.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_02: Can't remember what it was.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_02: It was called.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe there's Mountain Dew.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_02: One or whatever it was.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_02: I went away.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: I came back and she's, she'd got the house already starting to pack up.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_02: She's got Suki in one arm.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_02: She's like, I'm going back to New Zealand.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Are you coming?
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, drop the TV, drop your weapon.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's fine.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_02: That was it.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Her line was, I've put the house on the market.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going back to New Zealand.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_02: 10 days on her own with a newborn.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I have pushed her to her absolute limit and beyond this isn't fair.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I knew it was my turn to make sacrifice.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'd done the Olympics.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think the discussion around Ski Sunday was starting.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_02: So there was something, and little did I know it, Ski Sunday became my insurance policy.
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Media famously goes on holiday for Christmas.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_02: You get along on Christmas, New Year break.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_02: Media would come back to work in early January and I'd be on TV at 6.30 on
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_02: a Sunday night and people would remember you or think about you.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'd start Ski Sunday very often with not much work booked for the year, if any.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then by the time I'd finished that series,
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'd have something that looked like a framework of work put together.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would leave,
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_01: so you'd be,
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: so New Zealand was home base,
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: you'd fly back up to Europe then and basically do a solid chunk of
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_01: that European winter,
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: so from the first, first events probably, so then those kind of events.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, Ski Sunday was a very strict eight week run.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd fly back somewhere just before or just after New Year,
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_02: depending on where your first Sunday of the year fell.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd run eight weeks.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_02: But Sian and I made a deal that it was really no more than seven weeks.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_02: So if I was very tight with it, we could kind of do it in seven, seven and a half weeks.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_02: But that was you start to lose each other around that time.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter how much you talk, your routines become separate.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_02: You are not a part of each other's lives anymore.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the most punishing part of it is that living in New Zealand,
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_02: January, February is school holidays.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_02: So until the kids were nine and seven, I didn't have a summer holiday with them.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then we moved to Verbier and did three years in Verbier.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_02: I got a long-term contract offer from Red Bull.
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we started living on the same hemispheres a little more.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, those early years were hard, but we lived very close.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_02: You moved to this,
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_02: arguably one of the world's most beautiful countries, a heaven for action sports.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_02: But we moved to suburbia on the North Shore, which was a huge shift for me.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'd always lived either in quite liberal, vibrant cities or the mountains or beaches.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'd never, ever lived in suburbia.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'd grown up in a very rural,
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_01: free, open community.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you knew Sian, you got your kids, you got your in-laws.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'd done seasons.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Friends in Auckland?
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_02: I actually met Sian through some of her friends doing seasons in Val d'Isère.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_02: I bumped into them in 96 and she came over to visit them.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_02: And she lost them on the mountain, bumped into an Australian friend of mine.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_02: He came in to the apartment that night and was like, I've met the woman you're going to marry.
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, really?
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, yeah, she's coming to Dick's tonight, the nightclub.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Come and see her.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_02: She's fucking mental.
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Went out,
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_02: met her,
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_02: back flipped off the wall to try and impress her on the dance floor,
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_02: which is something I've never done before.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I tore my ACL.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's the beginning of my knee problems.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_02: And she just went, ah, you're funny.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Nice to meet you.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_02: And left.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't see her for five years.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Five years?
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_02: Holy shit.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then she fancied my best friend.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_02: So we went out that night when I saw her again.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I kind of said to her, we ran up the road.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_02: My mate had passed down.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_02: We ran up the road.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_02: She said, oh, you're so much fun.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_02: I said, look, I'll be really honest with you.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_02: I fancied you since that nightclub in 1996.
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And if you go out with my best friend,
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_02: we're not going to be friends, but this is going to be extremely difficult for me.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_02: And she got a bit crestfallen, but definitely didn't put her off.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_02: But my friend wasn't that into it.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_02: He's a little more sedate.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_02: He told me, I said to her, I said to him, are you into it?
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, no, she's mental.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_02: She never slows down.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, could I get her phone number or email?
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_02: He was like, no, that'd be weird.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_01: But well managed though, so you retained the friendship and you got the girl.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it took quite a long time to convince her and not be super creepy.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope she remembered the backflip with an injury like that.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like, oh, no, I don't remember.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_01: She did remember.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what was the injury?
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_01: I made an impression.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_01: the pain afterwards,
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_01: obviously, I mean, I'm assuming there's a bit of alcohol involved.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_01: How much did you try to carry that away?
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm fine.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_02: I had my wallet in my mouth, biting down.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_02: That was extremely,
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_02: I had landed in someone's,
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_02: my first knee injury was not a single point moment,
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_02: it was landing in,
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_02: biggest cliff I've ever done,
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_02: a huge step down,
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_02: about 20 metres,
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_02: and landed in the corner of someone's bomb hole and that definitely set it off.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_02: And then I did that with Sian,
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_02: backflipping off the wall,
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_02: and then I think I was in a,
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_02: A local Valdez Air Comp, won the border cross and then did the big air and landed.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_02: The lunatic,
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_02: same mate who had introduced me to Sian,
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_02: thought that if you got the cat to push,
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_02: if the landing was flat,
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_02: you just push some kind of boulders of snow onto the landing and
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_02: that had softened things up.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking back in 96,
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_02: I landed on one of those snow boulders and it clicked and tore the knee and then
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_02: that was the end of it.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a slow attrition.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_02: But I could have fixed the knee,
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_02: knowing what I know now about physio and conditioning,
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_02: I could have fixed the knee after any one of those and it would have been fine
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_02: with just a little bit of work.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_01: What is your body telling you now?
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you have a big night,
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_01: you're getting out of bed at four o'clock in some sifty Italian pensione.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_01: What's your body telling you after those sorts of injuries and this life?
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_02: Those, well...
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Sian got ill in 2011 from the breakneck lifestyle we were leading.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_02: She was managing two kids on her own and a husband who was gallivanting around the world.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_02: And part of the move to Verbier was getting her out of running her own business
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_02: and managing two kids with an absent husband.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_02: We put a cap on my travel at six months, but six months on your own, even with very...
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_02: Her parents lived just down the road, which was why we lived in...
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Torbay.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_02: But even then it was hard work and she got chronic fatigue.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_02: So she started healing herself with food,
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_02: realized that she was nearly celiac,
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_02: not clinically celiac, but some pretty heavy symptoms from gluten.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I could see that while she was stuck in New Zealand with the business hanging
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_02: over a post-GFC fashion distribution business,
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_02: she was running WSC for Ingmar Backman and Gregor Haglund, Swedish company.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_02: We'd gone over there and we imported that into New Zealand, or Sian did.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that was just weighing on her.
• 1:28:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I got this Red Bull contract.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_02: We moved the family out to Switzerland and she did this.
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_02: The friend who'd helped her heal herself through food Showed her the course
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_02: that she'd done, this INN course on nutrition.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_02: And she started learning about gut health.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that's been an ongoing project.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_02: She's done a lot of different stuff.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_02: But she's a registered health professional working in holistic health treatment.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's specialising in gut health.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_02: And she has...
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm getting to the point of this, I promise.
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_02: All good.
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_02: She...
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_02: She's used me as a project for a lot of her theories.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_02: So we got to the point where Suki and Oscar, the kids have got gluten intolerances as well.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_02: They're not just great on it.
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oscar's not great on lactose.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_02: He's got a load of different allergies.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_02: And rather than cooking two different or even three different meals in an evening,
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_02: it's like, look, we'll just eat the same food.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_02: So around 2017, I started eating...
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like knocking gluten out of my diet while I was at home.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then the penny dropped.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_02: I went on a trip and I got all of these injuries.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_02: I deal with aches, pains when things got cold.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_02: There'd be inflammation if I was riding hard anywhere, skating hard.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I went on a trip through America and we did Boston,
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_02: New York, Kentucky for some Red Bull shoots.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I just smashed the gluten.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_02: I was in the fried chicken and the bourbon and the subs.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I came home feeling dreadful.
• 1:30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Then I got back on the gluten-free diet.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd been mountain biking a lot in Verbier through that summer.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd noticed before I'd been on that trip, I was like, I feel 21.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_02: I feel light.
• 1:30:35
  SPEAKER_02: I feel sharp and fast.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd been starting.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_02: She was doing a yoga instructing.
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I was doing a bit of yoga with her.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I got back after that trip,
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_02: I got back gluten free, started doing more yoga and the penny dropped.
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, look after your body, it starts working well.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that Diary of a CEO,
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_02: Stephen Bartlett's got some shit for this, for having a glass of wine.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's at the pointy end of the stick.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the more you start looking after yourself, the better you feel.
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that becomes addictive.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm far from any saint.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_02: I fucking love a gin and tonic.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I have a threshold of about five drinks where I cannot think
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_02: about anything else except for a roll-up when I get there.
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_02: I probably have between 50 and 100 roll-ups a year.
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I've decided not to beat myself up about it.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_02: I live in Monaco.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_02: I get some of the cleanest air in the world.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, so maybe it's like living in Birmingham air quality now.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_02: But...
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_02: On the whole,
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_02: I have a really strict,
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_02: John's got me down to some pretty strict food,
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_02: but I don't notice it because the food we do cook is delicious,
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_02: but there's no gluten,
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_02: there's no sugar,
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_02: and I mean no fruit,
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_02: no fructose,
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_02: there's bits of lactose in there,
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_02: but almost no sugar apart from the odd gin and tonic or beer,
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_02: and then naturally I don't do caffeine.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_02: And my body is, I'll do 20 minutes, half an hour of Pilates.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'll do some knee strengthening exercises pre-season.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I can ride, I can skate, snowboard and mountain bike as hard as I was in my mid-30s now.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like...
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_02: You can party as much as you like till as old as you like,
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_02: but there is a definite stop somewhere where you can't drop a six metre cliff.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_02: You can't do cat track drops at full speed off triple treat.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_02: You can't hit 15 metre kickers up at Cardi's.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I can see those days...
• 1:32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they're still in triple figures.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they're in double figures.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to make the most of those.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_02: And anything that's going to help me do that for longer, I will do.
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the way I'm riding at the moment, I'm so pleased with.
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm in awe of what my body's letting me do now.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_02: They feel,
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_02: when I say it out loud,
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_02: no sugar, no gluten, they feel like giant sacrifices to people.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I watch Cheyenne with clients where she tells people, right, you can't eat gluten anymore.
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And she's like, the reaction always, these people have hit rock bottom with their health.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_02: And still the reaction is, I don't know if I can do that.
• 1:33:28
  SPEAKER_02: If I could show them how easy it is, To make a chicken stock at the start of the week.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_02: To eat largely just vegetables and meat.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_02: Not too many processed foods.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_02: The tiny compromises I've made for these giant gains in how I'm able to skate,
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_02: mountain bike, surf and snowboard.
• 1:33:50
  SPEAKER_02: There's no contest for me.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's so easy.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been able to introduce
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_01: similar, I guess, processes or systems for your relationship?
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And looking at other people's relationships,
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_01: how do you think the way that you guys have structured yours and
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_01: by your enforced absence each year,
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: how do you think that's created perhaps a unique relationship and bond
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_01: for your entire family?
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's a huge, huge question.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_02: Such far reaching implications because Sian is a voracious learner.
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_02: She is addicted to learning.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_02: She has a podcast in her ears all day.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_02: Every podcast you can think of around health, wellness.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_02: She's doing a master's in how screen use before bedtime will affect sleep patterns
• 1:34:49
  SPEAKER_02: in tweens and teens.
• 1:34:52
  SPEAKER_02: What she's taking on constantly.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_02: She is just driving forward at breakneck pace for progressive understanding of health.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_02: I...
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_02: I feel sometimes,
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_02: you know when you're in a water skiing boat and someone lets go of the rope
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_02: and it's bouncing around behind the boat?
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's me.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm that handle at the back of the boat that's never going to catch up
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_02: and is semi-drowning at the back.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_02: And she has to remind herself to let me catch up sometimes.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_02: She's been doing a lot of work on ADHD this year and I will come back from a trip
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_02: and suddenly...
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_02: 100% of the topic of conversation is ADHD and how I am now ADHD.
• 1:35:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm undiagnosed.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I am massively ADHD,
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_02: but I came back and was just informed that I am now because she's light years ahead
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_02: of me.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_02: She's informing me that the whole family has ADHD and these are the traits
• 1:35:50
  SPEAKER_02: and this is where they show up.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_02: And sure enough, with the kids, there's definitely something there.
• 1:35:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that she has it.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's a negative thing necessarily.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_02: And as so many people are seeing now, it's a superpower when you harness it and understand it.
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_02: But...
• 1:36:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm starting to get my head around maybe.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a brilliant listener, but I love the sound of my own voice.
• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_02: I can talk and my brain works fast.
• 1:36:15
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a fast mouth and my brain still works faster than my mouth.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm playing catch up, but then at the same time, Sean is...
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So independent and wonderfully happy with her own company and keeps herself busy.
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_02: The absences, I see a lot of friends.
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_02: I remember watching relationships in the 90s and early 2000s when...
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Girlfriends and boyfriends would hook up with people who didn't understand seasonal lifestyle.
• 1:36:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it looks so, you must have seen it, it looks so glamorous on the outside.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_02: But when you actually start seeing the reality of, right, we live in the mountains.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_02: We're not going to earn a whole lot of money.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_02: You're going to travel a lot.
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I either have to find a job that allows me to travel with you or I have
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_02: to be comfortable without you.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_02: And Shana's never once put any pressure on me anywhere.
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_02: There's a couple of times, but I've known it at that point.
• 1:37:19
  SPEAKER_02: We both know, as I mentioned earlier, that distance being created between you.
• 1:37:25
  SPEAKER_02: But my parents supported me unequivocally to follow, because they'd followed their passions.
• 1:37:34
  SPEAKER_02: They did the same for us as kids.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_02: And there was some mild judgment when we started getting, stepping over the line occasionally.
• 1:37:43
  SPEAKER_02: But Largely they supported us and Shana's done exactly the same thing.
• 1:37:47
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe subconsciously that was something that I fell in love with.
• 1:37:53
  SPEAKER_02: This real freedom and respect for each other's individual passions.
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_02: But we talk about this a lot.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Sian and I still make at least one day a week where we go up and shred together.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it's as much fun as it was when we were in our twenties.
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you have sat late, we go up and rip round Cardi's or TC and she still rips.
• 1:38:21
  SPEAKER_02: She absolutely fangs down the hill.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_02: And we enjoy each other's snowboarding so much and it kind of transports you back to
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_02: that 20s era where sort of
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: newly in love, the excitement, all of that.
• 1:38:38
  SPEAKER_02: We still have that.
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_02: We still share that.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I will never underestimate the value that that has for being able
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_02: to connect instantly as a couple.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's wonderful.
• 1:38:49
  SPEAKER_01: You're still the one, though,
• 1:38:50
  SPEAKER_01: that's made the cultural sacrifice in terms of living in Shan's culture
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_01: and Shan's country.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So your kids aren't going to be growing up with dry slope rashes.
• 1:39:02
  SPEAKER_01: But what are the things that perhaps that you got as a kid that you are a bit of
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_01: a bummer that they didn't get to experience that?
• 1:39:14
  SPEAKER_02: So my mum described this the other day.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_02: She said that by the age of four or five, she could see I just wanted to leave.
• 1:39:23
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted out of there.
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_02: The world that I grew up in was not big enough for me.
• 1:39:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember having a distinct,
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_02: as soon as I found skateboarding at 11,
• 1:39:32
  SPEAKER_02: there was a kid moved into our village,
• 1:39:34
  SPEAKER_02: Simon Tissington, and he did an ollie in front of me.
• 1:39:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like seeing magic.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'd been around skateboards,
• 1:39:42
  SPEAKER_02: but the idea that a skateboard could leave the ground without straps
• 1:39:45
  SPEAKER_02: or holding it was just sheer magic.
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_02: That was Gandalf styles to me.
• 1:39:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I was in love with that and skateboarding was happening somewhere else.
• 1:39:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to leave.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_02: And
• 1:40:01
  SPEAKER_02: I have had this, I said, I mentioned earlier that New Zealand...
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Wasn't love at first sight for me.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was a very slow burn.
• 1:40:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I did fall in love with it.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_02: Surfing on the North Island especially.
• 1:40:19
  SPEAKER_02: I got to spend Christmases and a lot of,
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_02: sometimes a bit of January,
• 1:40:24
  SPEAKER_02: depending on Ski Sunday, on the Coromandel, which I'm a very soft spot for.
• 1:40:29
  SPEAKER_02: But especially when we came down here in 2018 to the South Island,
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_02: I feel more Kiwi than I do British now.
• 1:40:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I've never been a Marmite and teabags.
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_02: I actually grew up as, I would say, a European first and a Brit second.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_02: By the time I was 17, I was in Greece and France all year, pretty much.
• 1:40:52
  SPEAKER_02: I came home to earn a bit of money in the shoulder seasons.
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Brexit broke my heart.
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_01: Horrific.
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell that story later.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_02: But with going back to the kids,
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things that's shaped the kids more than anything,
• 1:41:11
  SPEAKER_02: they've,
• 1:41:12
  SPEAKER_02: through my work and Sian and I's appetite for travel and passion to see the world,
• 1:41:19
  SPEAKER_02: they've seen so much.
• 1:41:21
  SPEAKER_02: They've spent time in Morocco, in Big cities across Europe.
• 1:41:26
  SPEAKER_02: We took them to Paris, Barcelona, Munich.
• 1:41:33
  SPEAKER_02: They lived in Verbier.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_02: They saw a lot of Switzerland, parts of Austria.
• 1:41:38
  SPEAKER_02: They've got a really broad frame of reference and they moved a lot.
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_02: And both kids are very settled.
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_02: They want to put down roots now.
• 1:41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Where Sean and I both couldn't wait to get out,
• 1:41:49
  SPEAKER_02: they've,
• 1:41:50
  SPEAKER_02: like most kids,
• 1:41:51
  SPEAKER_02: fought that paradigm that the parents set for them and are much more homebody.
• 1:41:57
  SPEAKER_02: But then you live in a place like Wanaka, what more do you want here?
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that it maybe didn't have that rich an art scene.
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then you get to see the theatre, the music, the art that happens here.
• 1:42:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's even a football culture down here.
• 1:42:13
  SPEAKER_02: That was the one thing I was ready to give up.
• 1:42:15
  SPEAKER_02: I thought, oh, there won't be much football down here.
• 1:42:17
  SPEAKER_02: And lo and behold, there's a whole troop of Liverpool supporters.
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Brexit broke your heart then?
• 1:42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was similar.
• 1:42:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was really shocked.
• 1:42:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was living in Germany at the time and it felt so personal.
• 1:42:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was a really strange one.
• 1:42:33
  SPEAKER_01: So how did that feel for you at the time?
• 1:42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Was it a real heartbreaker?
• 1:42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we were living in Verbier and the kids were at school in the local school
• 1:42:44
  SPEAKER_02: and it was very, very difficult.
• 1:42:45
  SPEAKER_02: This is a wider conversation,
• 1:42:47
  SPEAKER_02: but the kids ended up,
• 1:42:50
  SPEAKER_02: there was this teacher and she really didn't like Oscar, my youngest.
• 1:42:56
  SPEAKER_02: He was seven years old at the time and I turned up at the school gate on the morning
• 1:43:01
  SPEAKER_02: of the Brexit vote and she came to the school gate.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_02: And she'd never done that.
• 1:43:08
  SPEAKER_02: And she was hopping from foot to foot with excitement.
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, she wants to have a word.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_02: Walking up with Oscar,
• 1:43:15
  SPEAKER_02: his blonde haired kid,
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_02: and he's got a shock of white hair at the stress of having to go
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_02: into this class every day and speak French.
• 1:43:22
  SPEAKER_02: A classroom in language he doesn't understand.
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Julie, her name was, I can't remember her surname.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_02: And she came hustling up to me.
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, I think Brexit is a good thing.
• 1:43:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh yeah, why do you think that?
• 1:43:40
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, I do not think cultures should mix.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:43:45
  SPEAKER_02: I stood there handing my New Zealand-born son to her to teach for the day.
• 1:43:52
  SPEAKER_00: I said, okay, thank you for clarifying that.
• 1:43:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I started work on getting them into another school straight away.
• 1:43:58
  SPEAKER_02: And up until that point, I'd...
• 1:44:02
  SPEAKER_02: What we came up against in Verbier was very interesting,
• 1:44:05
  SPEAKER_02: but it was an expat community completely separated from a local community
• 1:44:13
  SPEAKER_02: who would not integrate.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_02: I justified it for a long time as maybe it was an extremely religious,
• 1:44:23
  SPEAKER_02: isolated mountain community who'd been invaded by hedonistic billionaires.
• 1:44:28
  SPEAKER_02: But we lived in Switzerland for three years
• 1:44:30
  SPEAKER_02: and what we saw there increasingly was this real lack of...
• 1:44:41
  SPEAKER_02: They were absolutely...
• 1:44:46
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't... What's the word I'm looking for?
• 1:44:49
  SPEAKER_02: It begins with a D. They didn't...
• 1:44:55
  SPEAKER_00: It'll come to me.
• 1:44:58
  SPEAKER_02: Not segregation, when you legislate against someone.
• 1:45:04
  SPEAKER_02: What's the word?
• 1:45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oi, where's your baby?
• 1:45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like disadvantaged, but like a... No, it's you...
• 1:45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Discriminate.
• 1:45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Discriminate.
• 1:45:13
  SPEAKER_02: Sid, shh.
• 1:45:14
  SPEAKER_02: Sid, you can find her baby, Tom.
• 1:45:17
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, how much longer do you reckon we're going?
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Two questions, basically.
• 1:45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 1:45:21
  SPEAKER_02: Two questions left, Tom.
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Fucking Sid, so sorry.
• 1:45:24
  SPEAKER_02: Don't worry.
• 1:45:25
  SPEAKER_00: You guys take your time.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um...
• 1:45:28
  SPEAKER_02: What we found,
• 1:45:30
  SPEAKER_02: I thought we'd got this,
• 1:45:32
  SPEAKER_02: I originally thought it was a very,
• 1:45:34
  SPEAKER_02: a deeply religious,
• 1:45:36
  SPEAKER_02: isolated mountain community that had been invaded by hedonistic billionaires.
• 1:45:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then, so you'd got these two very different styles of thinking.
• 1:45:45
  SPEAKER_02: But the more time we spent in Switzerland,
• 1:45:49
  SPEAKER_02: I wrote a blog about it and I got letters and correspondence from people
• 1:45:53
  SPEAKER_02: in big cities who were having the same experiences.
• 1:45:56
  SPEAKER_02: And the Swiss...
• 1:45:58
  SPEAKER_02: They were indiscriminate in their discrimination against foreigners.
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a tourist, you're absolutely fine going in.
• 1:46:05
  SPEAKER_02: But if you tried to live there, there was a barrier that you could never break.
• 1:46:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or even work there and commute.
• 1:46:09
  SPEAKER_01: Also, the Germans that are coming across the border and the French,
• 1:46:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure, they're not exactly welcome.
• 1:46:15
  SPEAKER_02: I had French friends who got it almost worse than us because the French were
• 1:46:19
  SPEAKER_02: the immediate younger brother or sister that you could look down on.
• 1:46:23
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 1:46:24
  SPEAKER_02: The Portuguese were accepted on a degree because it was almost as
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_02: if they accepted their position as second class agricultural workers,
• 1:46:32
  SPEAKER_02: as the fruit pickers and the farm workers.
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I was able to integrate in the local community,
• 1:46:38
  SPEAKER_02: driving the mountain bike club and playing football.
• 1:46:40
  SPEAKER_02: But other than that, we couldn't integrate.
• 1:46:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we stopped trying.
• 1:46:44
  SPEAKER_02: I had a neighbour who was 85.
• 1:46:46
  SPEAKER_02: He'd moved from Orsier, 12 kilometres as the crow flies, when he was 12.
• 1:46:52
  SPEAKER_02: And he'd never not been called an outsider in 73 years.
• 1:46:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I thought, what are we even trying to do here?
• 1:46:59
  SPEAKER_02: We can't win this battle.
• 1:47:00
  SPEAKER_02: We have to step down from this one.
• 1:47:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we did back away a little bit.
• 1:47:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was that was really tough.
• 1:47:07
  SPEAKER_02: And for the kids, that was a very, very formative experience.
• 1:47:12
  SPEAKER_02: And coming to Wanaka and experiencing the opposite was really important.
• 1:47:17
  SPEAKER_02: That was one of the most wonderful things we did 2015 to 18 in Verbier came here in 2018.
• 1:47:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the kids Wanaka is a town full of immigrants.
• 1:47:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it was just wonderful.
• 1:47:28
  SPEAKER_02: It was seamless.
• 1:47:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're someone who's lived a really large life, including a lot of absences from your kids.
• 1:47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Looking at them now and the role model that you've provided to them,
• 1:47:46
  SPEAKER_01: what do you hope they'll take from having you as their dad?
• 1:47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh,
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_02: that's a...
• 1:47:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a big one.
• 1:47:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's, I hope,
• 1:47:58
  SPEAKER_02: I really hope that I've been able to do what my parents did and show them that
• 1:48:05
  SPEAKER_02: a life lived with passion will be a fulfilling life.
• 1:48:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if without putting any expectation on them,
• 1:48:13
  SPEAKER_02: but showing them how to live,
• 1:48:16
  SPEAKER_02: that they, having faith that there's Passion and work ethic there.
• 1:48:22
  SPEAKER_02: My older brother struggled to find his passion originally around 17 to 21 maybe.
• 1:48:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a difficult transitional period for him.
• 1:48:31
  SPEAKER_02: But I look at both of the kids now and whether
• 1:48:34
  SPEAKER_02: the passions they have now are what will carry through, no idea.
• 1:48:38
  SPEAKER_02: But they have passion.
• 1:48:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the most important thing.
• 1:48:41
  SPEAKER_02: There are so many temptations or distractions that can carry you away.
• 1:48:46
  SPEAKER_02: But if you have a relatively wholesome passion,
• 1:48:49
  SPEAKER_02: Passion that's not hurting anyone else that I think you'll find your path in life
• 1:48:56
  SPEAKER_02: by following that.
• 1:48:57
  SPEAKER_02: I do believe that.
• 1:48:58
  SPEAKER_02: I listened to someone recently who said don't follow your passion like it's a dead end.
• 1:49:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think for some people that's maybe true but I think Sian and I
• 1:49:13
  SPEAKER_02: Both have, there's two things that I think are key.
• 1:49:18
  SPEAKER_02: Work ethic and passion.
• 1:49:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll add in there good manners.
• 1:49:25
  SPEAKER_02: And those three things,
• 1:49:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you're willing to work hard enough,
• 1:49:32
  SPEAKER_02: then your passion will happen for you.
• 1:49:34
  SPEAKER_02: So my son wants to be a rally driver.
• 1:49:36
  SPEAKER_02: The likelihood of that happening is minute.
• 1:49:39
  SPEAKER_02: But the chances of him Being a driver of some kind or maybe being a journalist in
• 1:49:44
  SPEAKER_02: that space or being an engineer or a designer or whatever it is.
• 1:49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Finding a role that is in a realm that he loves,
• 1:49:53
  SPEAKER_02: therefore doesn't feel like work is what I would hope for them.
• 1:49:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I hope we've shown them,
• 1:49:59
  SPEAKER_02: that whatever you want to do,
• 1:50:02
  SPEAKER_02: if you work hard and you've got good manners, it'll probably happen for you.