“The mobilising of the outdoors community is having an effect.”
An interview with three-time Olympic snowboarder, academic and environmental advocate Lesley McKenna from Aviemore, Scotland
“The mobilising of the outdoors community is having an effect. Is it a big enough effect? That’s a different conversation, as is how we ramp it up even more to speed up the process.”
I first met Lesley over a decade ago when she was coaching the women’s snow team at Roxy and I was editing Cooler Magazine. I remember being instantly struck by how down to earth and approachable she was, despite being a three-time Olympian (not always a given), and how wise she was, the kind of person at a dinner where people are pulling up chairs to listen to what she has to say.
Over the years, we’ve met up lots and I’ve been lucky enough to go splitboarding in the Cairngorms twice with Lesley as my Duracell bunny-esque guide. She stars in the new movie Thrawn (a ‘stubbornly Scottish snow film’), directed by our mutual great pal Hannah Bailey, and in this chat, we’ll get into that, whether elite sport is worth it and what professional snowboarders think about the environment.
Hey Lesley, you’re at the Laax Open snowboard competition right now. How is it and how’s the snow?
Hey, I’m good thanks. I’m in the riders’ lounge and the men’s half pipe coverage is about to start so people are glued to the huge screen.
It’s absolutely Baltic today but the actual conditions for the slopestyle and half pipe are amazing, they’ve done such an amazing job, and the stoke is very high in general.
How does the work you’re doing here relate to the PhD you’re doing at Leeds Beckett University?
I’m chatting to athletes for 20-30 minutes about what they’re aiming to do when they’re snowboarding, and what's important to them. They’re all being so generous with their time, and I’ve definitely been pleasantly surprised by the level of critical thinking from everybody I’ve spoken to and the humility.
There has been a lot of talk about the reciprocal nature of shared stoke and helping each other out. I Interviewed a couple of the top women’s slopestyle riders together yesterday and they told me they’ve been really helping each other out in training. They’re from different countries, competing directly against each other – you wouldn’t see that in another sport.
Last year, the Team GB pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw wondered aloud whether elite sport was worth it, are snowboarders less likely to think that?
One rider told me they thought the difference between action sports and (what they could see of) other sports was that in action sports everyone's a winner, as even if you don’t walk away with a medal, you’ve got that day or trick when everything came together, and you remember it for the rest of your life. And in high performance snowboarding you have it on film as well so there is an internal/external version of that best ever life defining moment.
The other thing is the connection to nature, what I like to call ‘positive insignificance’, that is realising how small and insignificant you are compared to nature and its awesomeness, people realise they’re not the boss of the world, but they experience that as a positive. It’s very freeing and it opens you up to appreciating lots of new ways to do things and think about the world without having to control it.
In terms of sustainability that’s really important as often corporate sustainability becomes about keeping the growth model or sustaining the status quo and that has no humility in it. If humans are always top of the chain, then sustainability becomes quickly, if not overtly, about some form of greenwashing, whereas the idea of degrowth could be about finding a more sustainable place in the world for humans, it’s far more holistic. I don’t think any brands are explicitly stating that sustainability is about degrowth yet except for Patagonia, but I think people are starting to think in that way.
I also think it’s really connected to diversity and inclusion, if you look for diversity as well as inclusivity that potentially changes the way we do things, so if doing things now is based on a growth approach, changing the way we do things could include a degrowth approach or other forms of more circular or holistic ways of working. Flatter hierarchies as opposed to top down structures can help too.
Did the athletes you spoke to mention their relationship to the environment?
Everybody said they feel more connected to nature through snowboarding and that it’s one of the main reasons they like to do it. A few people went further and thought about why it is important and what does that mean for the way they live their life.
50% of people offered that they were concerned about the climate without me prompting and whenever I do ask about it, people are definitely genuinely concerned about it and it’s part of their worldview.
Could there be a future where the health of the planet became more important than the winning or entering of a contest?
I haven’t started asking questions of that depth yet, but I’ll get there. I did have a good conversation with a head of partnerships at a national governing association, and I asked him specifically if they’re avoiding courting fossil fuel sponsors and he said yes and that they have to be very mindful of what’s socially acceptable.
So, the activism, the visibility and the mobilising of the outdoors community is having an effect. Is it a big enough effect? That’s a different conversation, as is how we ramp it up even more to speed up the process.
People in snowboarding are really open minded and pragmatic and there are huge opportunities there if you can take people with you, you’ll have a huge group of people to mobilise. But anything top down would also backfire in this kind of community I’m guessing.
It's 20 years since you set up Chunky Knit Productions to make films about women’s snowboarding, a seminal move at the time. How do you look back on that time?
They were so much fun to do, and the fun came from learning stuff and working with other people and taking on challenges. We learnt by failing, even just to get footage you can use in a film is really difficult, the whole process of planning and getting people together and the weather conditions. To have that experience and go through it was really rewarding and to have created a scene around it that had a positive effect on people’s lives and approach to sports was really rewarding.
The films feature in your new film Thrawn (directed by our great pal Hannah Bailey). Had the crew all seen them?
I was a little bit surprised about the effects the Chunky Knit films had had on the crew who were working on Thrawn. A few hadn’t seen them before, and, seeing them through their eyes, I thought maybe they were groundbreaking. We didn’t do it to be groundbreaking, we did it because we thought it would be fun and because no one else was doing it but I think there was also a political element that was even more powerful than we realised at the time.
If we’d not done it there is no way it would have happened on its own, and it opened a lot of locked doors, as did Amber Stackhouse’s Misschief Films and what Tina Birbaum did with the Roxy Chicken Jam. They were all part of the zeitgeist which has led to where women’s snowboarding is today.
And I think it did influence what people thought was possible, especially in the Scottish snow scene, but I was just following my Grandad who had been doing that already as you see in Thrawn.
Your amazing Grandad who I was lucky enough to meet once and who still rode an ebike around the hills in his early 90s. I always tell people I want to be like him when I’m older.
Yes, he and my Gran were both very pioneering people.
How is this winter going in Scotland?
There is actually a storm cycle coming in all connected to the El Nino year. The storms are likely to get more ferocious as the years progress with the climate breaking down so in pockets that means there might be some nice snow to ride in Scotland. People will be able to get out in the mountains and have shared experiences and learn how to be more responsible humans, so on the whole that could be a good thing.
We have some more Wandering Workshops coming up, and we’re giving away eight free bursary spots this year, which is awesome. And we’re able to support four local instructors to do their sidecountry leader awards, so supporting people to get into splitboard instruction and guiding as a career.
And we have three Thrawn premieres coming up in Scotland in February, in Fort William, Aviemore and Skye. We’re really excited to share the film with the Scottish people as it’s about how special the communities are here and how people who are doing any outdoor mountain sports in Scotland have a resilience, you learn to appreciate the struggle!
Watch Thrawn here.
Find out more about Wandering Workshops here and this is a piece I wrote about them for the Guardian titled: Ski touring without the machismo.
Other news:
Enjoyed this New York Times piece on the surfer Carissa Moore, who recently announced her forthcoming retirement. It sees her ponder the question: who am I if I don’t do this anymore? Which overlaps with some of the ideas Lesley was getting into above.
In a very different tone, this Whitelines piece by Chris Moran on whether snowboarding has peaked offended some people but made me laugh a lot.
As ever, please fwd this newsletter to anyone who you think might be interested & if you have any story tips on any of these themes pls get in touch.