The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.1
WAX TO WHEELS WITH BRETT TIPPIE
Words: Jann Eberharter 2019-09-23 13:50:19
When Craig Kelly tells you that you should race in the pro division, you should probably race pro. That suggestion kicked off Brett Tippie’s professional snowboard racing career in 1991. As further incentive, Craig sold Tippie a speed suit for $150. It was the second time they’d met.
Their first encounter at Mt. Baker, WA was classic Craig, too. “I saw him get off the chair by himself. He went off this ridgeline and he was looking around his shoulder all sneaky,” Tippie says. “So, I followed him down the ridge and he dropped into a chute and I dropped in once he hit the bottom. He waited at the chair for me and he’s like, ‘Did you just follow me down there?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And he goes, ‘Good run, huh? Don’t tell anybody.’”
The third time they met, well, “I don’t know how many people in the world have run Craig Kelly’s head into a fridge, but I’m one of them,” Tippie says.
Between shared lines, speed suits and raucous parties, Brett and Craig formed a close friendship, one that would grow, even as the duo took separate paths to parallel status in two very different sports. Craig, of course, became a snowboard legend. Tippie’s love for snowboarding, however, introduced him to mountain biking. Eventually migrating from his hometown in Kamloops, BC to Vancouver’s North Shore, Tippie helped pioneer mountain biking’s freeride movement as the sport went mainstream.
Tippie started snowboarding in 1983, after he saw an ad for a Burton Backhill in Action Now magazine. He built his first board out of a sheet of plywood, using BMX tires for bindings and inner tubes for heel straps.
“Back then there were no resorts that allowed snowboarding except for this little family hill just outside of Kamloops called Harper Mountain,” Tippie says. “They said, ‘If you buy a lift ticket, you can rock whatever you want out there.’”
By the time he graduated high school, he’d started riding at Sunshine Village near Banff, AB where he met Alex Warburton and the Achenbach brothers. Then, in 1988-89, Whistler began allowing snowboarders.
“[Snowboarding] was growing exponentially but it was a little family that was cruising around in the early days,” Tippie says. “I was racing boardercross and it was exciting and new and there was money in the sport. Racing was pretty wild back then because we were doing it in soft boots, and everything was so experimental.”
When Tippie went pro, he placed 11th in his first race. Craig placed 10th and Tippie lost $10 on a bet they had made prior. After racing a few World Cups, Tippie started riding for Burton in ’94, raced on the Canadian National team and took home top-10 finishes at a few World Cup and FIS-sanctioned giant slalom races in the late ’90s.
In the summers, his teammates and competitors would travel to South America and Europe to train. Meanwhile, Tippie would be planting trees in Kamloops, trying to stack money for the upcoming season. To keep his skills sharp, he started taking his board to the Kamloops gravel pits where he’d shuttle runs and carve turns for hours on end.
“Then I started taking my bike down there,” Tippie says, “and started carving turns on my bike and dropping cliffs, trying to show off for the girls. Suddenly I discovered mountain biking, and I had the world record for jumping the biggest cliff for a little while. Biking in the gravel pits was almost easier than snowboarding them.”
From there, it was only a matter of time before bikes consumed Tippie’s attention. In 2000, he retired from snowboarding as the Canadian Pro Grand National Boardercross Champion. By this time, Tippie had joined forces with two other Kamloops boys, Richie Schley and Wade Simmons, and together they pushed a new fringe of mountain biking known as freeride.
The trio signed on with Rocky Mountain Cycles, a Vancouver-based company, and became the Fro Riders (the term “freeriders” was trademarked by a different bike company)—the definitive force that brought mountain biking into a new era of gigantic drops, wooden features and big mountain lines.
“All of a sudden I was getting paychecks from a bunch of different sponsors and I was getting plane tickets to go ride around the world and do events and ride crazy places,” Tippie says. “I never really had that snowboarding. It was never a full ride. [I was] making six digits, so I really focused on mountain biking because that’s what was paying the bills.”
Through it all, Tippie continued to snowboard when he could. He missed a few powder days, but it became a way of keeping balance in his life. One of his yearly traditions has been to race in the Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom. In 2016, the event’s 30th anniversary, Tippie donned Craig’s speed suit for his finals run, paying homage to a good friend, mentor and lifelong inspiration. He walked away with a bronze duct-tape trophy in the Mid Masters category.
“I’m a pro mountain biker,” Tippie says, “but I’m secretly really a diehard snowboarder. I still snowboard as many days as my marriage will let me get away with.”
Photo Caption: Just like the old days. Tippie leads mountain biker Andreu Lacondeguy down a gravel pit in Whistler, BC, circa 2014. Photo: Ale Di Lullo
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