In the latest episode of Live It Up, Feet Banks connects with Stan Rey, a master of the goggle tan and one of the most personable professional freeskiers in the game. Always ready to joke around for videos and happy to share the stoke or his knowledge with anyone who needs it, Stan is a natural-born backflipper who grew up mostly in Whistler and has raced gates, raced ski cross and raced into the hearts of freeski fans around the world with his charm, skills and his philosophy of putting fun first. PARENTAL ADVISORY: three naughty words in this one.
Beginnings
Stan was born in 1988 in a village in Switzerland called Crans-Montana. His grandfather was a two-time Olympian and a 13-time Swiss national champion in alpine skiing and Stan’s father was on the national Swiss junior ski team. At the age of 7, Stan moved with his parents to Whistler.
He spent two years on the BC Ski Team and then decided to give ski-cross a shot. After a year of racing on the Nor-Am circuit, he was selected for the Canadian National Ski-Cross Team. He spent three years on the team, where he won a Canadian National title and a 4th place finish at X-Games.
“Then at 24 I decided I should probably try and be a freeskier before it’s too late. And I was just over racing. It was in the back of my mind. I had gotten injured two years in a row. And I didn’t have that many good friends on the team. It’s funny because after I retired [from racing], I became better friends with a few of the guys who were on the team. But at the time, I felt like the loner on the team.
So I wasn’t having that much fun—and I live for fun. I think two main reasons really drew me to sports—having fun, and competition. I’m super competitive. And the people I’m most competitive with are my best friends.
The Transition to Freeskiing
The freeskiing world is competition with less pressure. I never dealt amazingly with pressure but freeskiing is, in a sense, outside of competition. In the Freeride World Tour you feed off other people—you watch your buddies hit something and land a sick line and you’re like, I want to go try and one-up them.
There’s a camaraderie that you don’t quite get when you’re racing. When I was racing, I didn’t really care how other people did. I just wanted to win and beat them. But now it’s like, I want to watch my buddy land a sick line and then go and try and do better or do my version of it.
“But the transition to freeskiing was tough at first. Ski racing is so structured. Everything’s set out for you. Like you’re going here, you’re going to race this, and you’re traveling with the team. And with freeskiing, I had no clue what I was doing. I knew I wanted to be a freeskier, but how do I get there? And I’d been freeskiing all my life. I’d be doing stupid shit all the time, like backflipping. And I think my first backflip was in my parents’ backyard on snowblades.”
The “Yes Man”
“So with freeskiing, I was like, ‘I gotta try and leech on the Whistler Blackcomb thing because they’re a huge resort and they’re looking for media.’ So every time it snowed a little bit, I’d go out and shoot these little videos.
And then I got to meet some photographers like Eric Berger and Paul Morrison. I bugged them all the time to go on shoots. I was a Yes Man. Anytime someone asked me to do something, I did it just to try and get my name out there.
And then I ended up getting a pretty lucky break. I rode up the chairlift with Jay Trusler, a guy I went to high school with. He said, ‘we’re shooting an on-hill segment for Sherpas for Into the Mind. You want to come join us?’
They were doing a shoot in the Dominator [cliff drop] area. And I remember Matty Richard didn’t want to hit Dominator, as the conditions weren’t the best. I was 25, I was hungry, I didn’t really care. So I’m like, ‘I’ll hit Dominator. I’ve hit it a few times before.’ And I ended up doing a backy and landed it. And then they ended up shooting the scene three times.
And then I got to spend the next week shooting for the on-hill segment, which was awesome. And that really put my foot in the door. Two weeks later, I got a call from Salomon Freeski. Then I got on the Salomon trip to Japan. That was my dream come true, pretty much. I got to go there with Chris Rubens who I had watched in ski movies when I was growing up.
And for my second trip, I’m skiing with Rubens, Mark Abma and Cody Townsend in the Whistler backcountry. And I’m like, ‘I suck at sledding. I’m getting stuck everywhere.’ But I was on cloud nine. I was skiing with my idols. When you realize your idols are actually awesome people, super-friendly and encouraging, it’s really cool.
In the big mountains, everyone realizes we’re not in charge here. So it sort of keeps people humble—or teaches them to be humble quickly.
Listen to the full conversation here.
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