Welcome to the Weekly Wetzler, a column in which I tell you everything that is wrong with snowboarding and convince you to quit and take up snowblading or just give up on activity altogether and spend the rest of your days on the couch eating Pringles and watching daytime television.  In today’s column we will be discussing “nose” and “tail” slides, a topic that never fails to get me fired up.

For the purposes of this column I will often compare  snowboarding to skateboarding.  It is not a comparison I enjoy making, but one that is unavoidable and admittedly useful.  Often times I ask myself, “How can you compare two things that occupy such vastly different places on the spectrum of “good” and “bad?”  Could you compare, for example, a day at the beach with a beautiful girl to having someone slowly drive a razor blade into your Adam’s apple?  No, you could merely say that the first is “good” (and if the girl doesn’t speak English, “great) and the second is “bad.”  Likewise, it is difficult to compare snowboarding with skateboarding, but still a comparison that has proven applicable because snowboarding, like many other “action sports,” has done its damndest to replicate skateboarding, despite obvious impediments i.e. the rider being strapped to a board, riding on snow, and possessing roughly as many brain cells as a lemming.

But I digress.  We are here to talk about “nose” and “tail” slides, and why they are an abomination.

You cannot truly do a nose or a tail slide on a snowboard.  You simply can’t.  This is because the bottom of a snowboard has no physical barrier that separates the “nose,”  the “middle,” and the “tail”;  It’s just one smooth plane.  How then, does one tell the difference between a frontside “nose” slide on a snowboard and a poorly executed front board (or vice versa)?    How does one tell the difference between a “tail” slide and a poorly executed lipslide?  The answer: one can’t.  It’s subjective.

Ugh. I just threw up in your mouth.

This subjectivity when it comes to “nose” and “tail” slides is one of the biggest complaints I have with park tricks in snowboarding.   On a snowboard it is possible, even probable, for a frontside noseslide attempt to turn into a front board halfway down the rail.  It is also possible to attempt a frontslide noseslide and instead execute a maneuver that on a snowboard falls into the “gray area” between frontside noseslide and frontside boardslide.  On a skateboard, this gray area does not exist.  The middle of the board, used for boardslides, and the tail and nose of the board, used for tail and nose slides, are clearly separated by the trucks, a barrier of hardened, forged steel.  So, while on a snowboard a rider might try to do a frontside noseslide but accidentally do a frontside boardslide, on a skateboard, unless the rider has recently ingested a large amount of Quaaludes or lost one or both of his eyes, this will never happen (and when it does you will know: in snowboarding the botched attempts are often landed; in skateboarding, the botched attempts are rewarded with brief period of time spent writhing on the ground in pain).

Now that’s more like it. Boots: Frontside Noseslide.

Why should you care, you ask?  Because in snowboarding or skateboarding or any sport in a similar vein (Barry, I know you like to lace up the rollerblades when no one’s watching), aesthetics are everything.  And “nose” slides and “tail” slides, the bastard children of the rail-trick repertoire, so often poorly performed, are ruining snowboarding’s aesthetics.  You might as well get out the snowblades, because down the road it’s heading, snowboarding is just one step away.  Or should get out the Pringles?

-Wetzler

Front page image courtesy of Davey Rukin