Farmville420Garret Whaley, Zahner, and Lupe.
Grew up riding with Garrett, watching him progress has been one of the greatest joys of my life tbh. He filmed my first 1080, and now I’m watching him get filmed on the gnarliest rails I’ve ever seen.
Lupe is the champion of Connecticut and got 860 printed on multiple skis. We always knew he was going pro, he’s one of the greatest Carinthia legends ever.
Zahner put jersey on the map and also was the kid everyone my age was looking up to. He came in to the scene so young and was just dropping outrageous videos constantly. It wasn’t that he was good and young, that’s not super uncommon, but he was so consistent with making edits. Probably made like 30 banger edits before he was 18, would always pull up to Carinthia with a camera crew and film the gnarliest shit. Some of those gopro edits I still play on repeat.
misinterpreted the thread, the biggest influence on the sport as a whole might be Cam Riley tbh.
Freeskiing was always gonna happen, progression was going to happen, but I think the most unnatural thing that happened in the sport was people really tapping in to their individual strengths and not just progressing the sport the way x games wanted you to, but the way the rider wanted to. Cam was like “well I’m not technical on rails and my jumps won’t get me sponsored, so I’ll just grind the gnarliest rails anyones ever seen and jump off the biggest shit ever and see what happens. Wound up going pro. I might be wrong, but I feel like before cam the path to being pro was kind of cut and dry, and exclusive to competition athletes and backcountry riding. After cam kids could go pro just off of doing tricks they were nice at. I mean he probably didn’t directly influence anyone besides some kids my age but I think he kind of pioneered that mindset in skiing which is the biggest and most impactful development imo
