We can feel the Olympic hype heating our fingers as we type. And it appears to be Gretchen Bleiler all day long. Here she gets profiled on VanityFair.com and we’re guessing this is just the tip of the hypeberg:
But the dichotomy between being a fashion designer and a gangster shredder isn’t Bleiler’s only contrariety. She also straddles the worlds of core and mainstream snowboarding. “Snowboarding, from the beginning, has always been a very core sport, and at first there were a lot of riders who resisted the growth of this sport on the mainstream level—thus the Olympics—as it seemed that it represented selling out the soul of the sport. But things have changed,” she says, pointing out that now kids are growing up going to snowboarding academies and training to be Olympians. “Even though this is still a very image-conscious sport, there are riders who are able to walk the line between core and mainstream.”
[Link: Vanity Fair via @GretchenBleiler]
