The Freeski world is astir after Tanner Hall got a little too deep into the fine French vino and made some rather alarming comments about certain skiers and certain types of skiers (something along the lines of getting out of the park, you fucking rollerbladers, Peter Olenick, Simon Dumont, blah, blah, blah...). The video was posted on zapniks.com and was removed yesterday and replaced with a video of Tanner apologizing, but only after every ski blogger and twitterer wrote about the original video... so the damage was done. I can think of two main things I take from this story:

On the one hand, I think it's kind of cute that the freeski world manages to work itself up in such a lather over this whole thing. It's almost like it's a professional sport or something and not a lot of people just out having fun. Don't get me wrong, the respect and legitimacy and dollars the sport has earned for itself over the past decade or so has been beyond impressive and deserved. But only a very small handful of people make their living as professional freeskiers... more people make more money bowling in the US than they do freeskiing (I would be willing to bet). It's silly for any sport to take itself too seriously; it's just sports. Tanner's comments aren't really important/relevant/influential in any real sense of those words. The point is, beyond the few individuals called out specifically, no one has any real stake involved in caring about what he said. It was just one very-well known skier (who could be identified by perhaps .05% of the US general population) who got caught in a drunken ramble on camera. So what?

On the other hand: I really want to like the guy because he is a fucking amazing skier, and I tend to want to admire those whose skills in any walk of life I am in awe of. The real shame is the damage Tanner did to his position as the de facto king of the freeski world. Everyone remembers the early videos and has heard the stories of Tanner's earlier days when he (quite rightly) thought he was the shit and (quite annoyingly) let everybody know about it. Nobody likes a prima donna, and it's hard to say he was anything but that. Youth is a fine excuse for those things. But over the years it seemed like Tanner grew out of that stage. In recent years he has come across as more humble, more respectful to everyone in the ski world, and freeskiing needs guys like that. Good people are easier to root for. They generate income dollars for the sport as a whole and that benefits everybody. So he set himself back on this one...

Tanner's done a ton for the sport, and I doubt you'll ever see anything like that out of him again. Everybody deserves a pass, and as long as he calls up the people he called out in the video and makes a personal apology and doesn't do anything as low class as this again, the whole thing should just be forgotten about. The punishment of waking up hungover and realizing what an unbelievable asshole you were last night is usually enough.