In the wake of the first ever appearance of freeskiing in the olympics, there have been consequences, some for the worse, some for the better. More money has been pumped "into skiing" but most of the people who competed and the people who put skiing there in the first place aren't seeing any of it. The same crews that were scraping by paycheck to paycheck and hammering out the gnarliest urban segments aren't better off because of the olympics.
The only skiers I would say benefited from the Olympics were the ones on the podium and Henrik, due mainly to his ridiculous baggy pants and natty dreads (don't get me wrong I fucking love Henrik).
As I'm typing this, @NickGoepper has 84,219 followers on Instagram. Most of them are presumably teenage girls judging by the comments. Gus Kenworthy is past the limit of exact numbers with 6 digits and 131k followers. They may soon be akin to Ryan Sheckler and Shaun White in the eyes of feamel adolescents everywhere. This doesn't intrinsically mean to imply that Nick or Gus have "sold out" or aren't "core" anymore but I can tell you if all I did was ski to have fun and found myself at the top of the world's stage, the fame would bother me. I think that much fame from anything would bother me. It's not why we're all in skiing. We skiers generally do not do well in the limelight. All it takes is a couple minutes with Reed Speedman on the mic during war of rails or a red-eyed Torin Yater-Wallace interview to realize that. The average pro is not someone a parent wants their child to look up to. Granted, the names I chose in this paragraph were pretty vanilla as far as pros go, and maybe that's the key to a sustainable pro skiing career, but we don't owe it to anybody to shine ourselves up.
Was it a bad thing? Were the Olympics as a whole good or bad for skiing? Not the industry, the actual skiers. It feels to me like we've been exploited, and not enough of us (us as in the top level skier, not me personally) are seeing the benefits.
I'm honestly curious to see what people have to say. I'd love for one of the dudes on the podium to give their two cents if they see this.