Famous Ski Bums

          Many professional skiers are just ski bums who are better at skiing than most people. Skiing, especially freestyle skiing, is not something that people get into for the money; there is almost none. Since freestyle skiing is still an emerging sport, there are not as many massive sponsors willing to throw millions of dollars at athletes. There are a few professional freestyle skiers who make a living off of their talent, but very, very few. If freestyle skiers want to be good enough to be professional, they have to be skiing everyday. This means that they, essentially, have to be ski bums. Most of them are young, white men who love skiing.

          One major difference between a regular ski bum and a professional skier is sponsorships. Ski bums have to pay for everything and work extremely hard to be able to make ends meet. They must get a job with the mountain, or else they have to pay the full price of a season pass. Professional skiers get their skiing paid for at any mountain they go to, as well as their travel expenses. All they really have to pay for is lodging and food. Regardless, most of these professional skiers, with their fancy sponsorships, live ski bum lifestyles. They live in cramped conditions with many people, in order to afford a house in good proximity to the mountain, just like most other ski bums.

          My favorite famous ski bums are Ian Cosco and The Line Travelling Circus. Both of them are well-known professional skiers, with full sponsorships and all, but live ski bum lifestyles. Ian Cosco is a Canadian skier, who has a video blog called "Chug Life." It is a window into the real lives of professional skiers. The best thing about the video blog is that it shows that professional skiers act and live the same way as most ski bums. They are just looking to have fun and go skiing as much as they can. The Line Travelling Circus is a group of young professional skiers (mostly from the East coast), all sponsored by Line Skis, who jump in a sponsored van and travel all around the United States skiing, with a lot of other random footage from the road. They fit the description of "bums" better than most ski bums do. These are the kinds of guys who sleep in their car for weeks and don't shower for days. Like Ian Cosco, the Line Travelling Circus has a video blog as well, where they videotape all of their adventures. Their blog is more focused on skiing than Chug Life, but it still provides a great opportunity to see how professional skiers live; not much differently than the average ski bum.


Chug Life: http://newschoolers.com/ns/content/tvchannel/id/4826/t/chugLIFE/

Line Travelling Circus: http://newschoolers.com/ns/content/tvchannel/id/3924/t/Traveling+Circus/