175: Sandy MacDonald/The View From The Booth
Jackson x Natural Selection omnibus special!
Yep, myself and my right-hand man Owen Tozer are on our first podcast trip of the Covid era. We’ve been in Jackson Hole for the first stop of the Natural Selection Tour, and have taken the opportunity to record as many episodes as we could with people involved in the event, from Jackson, or from the wider snowboarding community.
Continuing with this conversation with judge Sandy MacDonald. One of the things I’ve been trying to do while out here is to throw some some light onto some of the more opaque aspects of the Natural Selection experience, and in that light a chat with one of the judges seemed an essential port of call.
Because, as a cursory examination of the snowboarding conversation has revealed, the judging at this year’s event has been subject to criticism, whether below the line, among the community at large and even among the riders themselves.
So to try and understand the judging process a little bit more clearly, and to get insights into some of the more contentious calls from this year’s Jackson event, I grabbed Sandy for a chat.
And what a revealing insight into the the whole judging process this conversation really is. I approached this one by trying to think about what questions I want answered as a fan, and to try and address as many of the issues and explicit criticisms that I’ve seen doing the rounds in the aftermath of the event.
Huge thanks to Sandy for being such a good sport in this one, and for tackling each of these questions with total accountability and transparency. I leaned a lot and I hope you do too. Listen to the episode below: