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I think you're misunderstanding what he's saying. The way the project came out, it's about the buildup to the Olympics for these particular athletes. It's an extended athlete profile with a bit of background on the sport thrown in there. I'd love for someone to make the movie you're describing, but it's sort of irrational to get angry at Vice for not doing so. It'd be like yelling at Pixar for not making a drama about drug abuse and organized crime because you happened to want to see that rather than another cute CGI flick.
The main problem here was packaging. The title is "Free", the whole way it's presented makes you think it's about the sport, rather than the past 6 months of preparation for four US olympic hopefuls. If you had presented it to everyone as "Road to Sochi" or something and subtitled it "Vice chronicles the journey of four skiers at the top of their sport as it makes its first appearance on the mainstream stage", or something, no one would have any real problem, because the film would have delivered on what it said it was going to deliver.
Now, even if it'd done that I still think it could've done it better. There was too much "we do this for the adrenaline", EXTREM SPORTZ bullshit, which the producers seemed intent on pushing as the skiers' motivation. That bothers me. The other opportunity missed to take this beyond an athlete profile was to do a better job working through at least one of the two major issues that were brought up: the progression of women's freeskiing, or the sport's internal split as to whether going to the olympics is appropriate. The latter would have been a lot more interesting, obviously.
So basically, I think the film is fine if you take it for what it IS, rather than what it CLAIMS to be. Not great, but pretty good, and useful to the casual non-skier American who wants to know a bit about the people he's cheering for and what they do.
^Again I think you're under a misapprehension of what the project actually was. If it'd been a documentary about Freeskiing from its inception to the olympics, then yeah, it would be pretty messed up not to include Newschoolers in something like that. Given what it actually was, they really didn't have to talk to anyone besides the athletes they were focusing on, because the scope of the project wasn't any larger than those four people (and I guess the people who surround them, like coaches and family).
Even having Tanner involved was more of a contextual thing than a necessity. Obviously, if you were making a documentary about the sport itself, Tanner would be a centerpiece of a flick like that.
Again, I really think the way this thing was presented to people did it a big disservice.
