Style matters in everything you do. Bird doing après transportation his way below the Aiguille du Midi lift plaza. Bird’s “full wingspan” approach to life (a term he coined for the effortless flow reached at the pinnacle of a pursuit of passion) was cultivated amid the gauntlet, circus and ec-centric tour de force that was Chamonix in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Somewhere between the adrenaline and illicit substances that coursed through the valley’s lifeblood in its (second) golden age also ran a vein of ingenuity. If necessity is the mother of invention, Chamonix is an incubator for progres-sion, fed by its insatiable imperative to go steeper and faster. It’s the kind of place where a ski shop suggests grinding down the screwheads on a pair of ultralight boots to eke out an extra degree of forward lean. “Skis got fatter and people started skiing the steep stuff earlier in powder,” Bird recalls of the freeride revolution. “But we had friends going down left and right. People going further and farther and past—and suddenly they were gone. You could go as far as you wanted—whether in the moun-tains or in the town,” he adds with a dry chuckle and a sigh. “We were lucky to make it through those days.” Bird was thrown into the deep end of la pente raide in his late 20s by the likes of Marco Siffredi, Paul McLeod and Stephane Dan—pioneers of modern-day freeriding. But it was a few years later that he witnessed Antoine Montant, in a precursor to speed riding, skiing with a small wing overhead in Les Grands Montets. Montant and his friend, Francois Bon, are considered the founders of speed riding, a multidisciplinary sport that came into existence in the mid-2000s. Montant and Bon came from flying backgrounds, having each won paragliding acrobatic championships, so the fledgling sport was born as a natural offshoot of speed flying (fast, proximity paragliding with a small wing). Montant went on to push the descent aspect with an array of headline-inducing perfor-mances, including a descent of the Eiger, Grandes Jorasses, and a viral Red Bull video speed riding the decommissioned cables of the old Aiguille du Midi. Montant died in a BASE accident in 2011. Bon, who coached the French paragliding acro team for a half decade and competed in cross-country paragliding competitions, is now the co-founder for and lead designer of a wing manufacturer based in the French Alps. Like most beginnings of extreme sports, speed riding started at the fringe, but in a locale like Chamonix, the start was less abrasive and viewed more as an eye-opening feat of human performance. Even though the sport is condoned widely today, the Chamonix Valley is one of a few places in the world that hosts multiple speed riding-specific schools. Speed Riding 055
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 1: Page 55
