Mountain Hardwear also dropped a total of 13 of its 20 sponsored athletes, including renowned Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck.
[...]
Mountain Hardwear brand manager Kari Rice says the reason the company cut its athlete team so drastically was to focus on those who tell stories “that resonate with an average outdoor user.”
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[Former photo/video editor at the North Face, Scott] Willson understands why the priorities have shifted in recent years, but he wonders if social media mandates—say, requiring three publishable images per week via satellite transmission—dilute the material’s impact as a whole. “It’s like you’ve taken all this emotion away from this beautiful stuff,” he says. “Now it’s just content to fill buckets.”
http://www.outsideonline.com/2070866/so ... t-crossing
I'm pretty shocked that MH dropped Ueli Steck, who is basically in a league of his own. And I don't look forward to the coming (slash current) onslaught of endless "blog" posts superficially expounding on the meaning of "exploration" and "adventure," as conceived by sponsored trustafarians with film crews. (See: the current state of the Banff Mountain Festival.) Maybe the content promoters should take note of the general intellectual banality of great athletes, per David Foster Wallace:
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.
[…]
It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it – and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.