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There are a lot of opinions floating around the ski world. There always have been a lot of opinions, but the internet gives those of us who think highly of ourselves a loud voice. And so we give voice to our opinions, and we whine (and post anonymous rants) when people don’t agree with us. We revel in the “I told you so”. We are connoisseurs of the anonymous smear. And we generally shut up and disappear when we’re wrong.

I have an opinion on opinions. Opinions are useful only when results aren’t  Matters of opinion include questions of personal taste, like the color of your iPhone cover.  Or whether or not an iPhone cover is necessary.  But I digress. Your opinion is really all that matters there. But opinion becomes irrelevant quickly when we start talking about matters of qualitative judgment. In these matters there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and your personal taste, or opinion, is beside the point.

Let’s take, for example, wine. There is such a thing as great wine, and such a thing as really mediocre wine. Most of us only ever get to drink mediocre wine. If you haven’t tasted much good wine, you might find a great wine really challenging. You might prefer the taste of Smoking Loon.

Or some other trendy designer label applied to a “delicious yet uncomplicated” blend of uninspired crap. That’s where opinion ends. If you so much as think that the Smoking Loon is in any way better than a 1990 Chateau Latour Pauillac then you’re flatly wrong. If you think that a description like: “It is acclaimed for its finale, which seems to linger endlessly with the tastes of caramel, dark cherry, chocolate, roasted fruits and licorice” reeks of pretension you may be right. But if you dismiss it as BS, then you’re dumb.

Anywhere that people dedicate time to learning a field you will find a certain consensus among the most experienced practitioners. Nobody will ever spend a lifetime learning and tasting the great vintages, and settle on Smoking Loon as a favorite. Experience has a nose for quality, and quality is absolute in character. This phenomenon holds in the arts as well. You might not “get” abstract modernism and you might not like Hip Hop, but your opinion must bow to the judgment of people who  actually know art and music when it comes to attributions of quality. And you’d better believe there are truly great Hip Hop artists (Looking your way, Wheezy.)

Skiing makes things easy on us because we don’t have to wait for the test of time and the preponderance of expert assessment to judge quality. We have results. Petter Northug is astonishing, amazing, and probably some other superlatives as well. And yet… And yet people in our ski community have publicly given voice to the assertion that his technique is no good. People have criticized Lukas Bauer’s classic skiing. This is what you get when you take a guy who’s accustomed to Smoking Loon and you ask him to comment on that 1990 Chateau Latour Pauillac. Opinions that
overstep the boundaries of personal preference have a name. Several names, actually. The most concise name is “wrong”.  It is the opposite of right which is what governs expertise.

Expertise is a tricky thing. While it draws heavily on experience, it’s not the same thing. You can have a lot of experience doing something wrong. A bottle a day of Boone’s Farm does not make you a wine expert. Twenty five years of coaching terrible skiers doesn’t make you an expert on skiing. To become an expert you need to evolve and improve. You need to drink better wine, and learn why it’s better. You need to coach better athletes, and come to understand the challenges and obstacles that are faced at higher levels of competition.

A lot of us folks who think highly of ourselves would say that we have at least a measure of expertise. We’re wrong. You’re wrong. You have opinions and they’re mostly wrong. This wrongness is good too. Even the very biggest and best experts have a lifetime of wrong opinions behind them.

The internet has done a funny thing to experts. The ones who aren’t arrogant pricks have gone into hiding. Amongst the best coaches, there’s nearly a pact of silence. This wasn’t always the case. When folks first started catching on to the internet this wasn’t so much the case. I remember reading a usenet discussion in the late ‘90s in which Heikki Rusko made a comment. You know what happened? You’d hope that everybody would stop stating their opinions, shut up, and read what the dude was writing. But no – they argued with him. They didn’t have the first clue who he was, and I guess they didn’t bother to look him up. (If you don’t’ know him, Heikki went away from the internet. If Cloxxki were around then, it would have been him who chased off Heikki.

This is where the rant fires up. Not all opinions matter. What my little brother thinks about heart disease is less important than my cardiologist, despite the fact that my brother has had a heart beat his WHOLE LIFE.

There is expertise in skiing. There is right and wrong, and it is borne out over time in results. For most of the folks reading this website, we haven’t borne it out. Period. So it doesn’t matter where you ski, or who you coach. So far, we’ve all been sticking to our own boxes of Franzia. It has a rakish charm, but no one gives a shit.

I keep hearing how there “is no right or wrong answer” about how to make skiers fast. I’m thinking the answer just hasn’t been found and that there actually is a right answer. But that’s just my opinion and I’ve probably had too much wine.