Why Ross Rebagliati
Had To Play Lame To Stay Hip

by Pat Michels

Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared on a website called ADAD in 1998. Here's why we're reprinting it now.

In the tense hours following the IOC's decision to strip Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati of his Gold Medal for the Men's Downhill event, there was speculation aplenty about possible IOC conspiracies to kick the snowboarders out after only their first appearance.

Snowboarding's "insider" journalists, like those at Snowboarding Online (home of "guerrilla" coverage of the Winter Games), wrung their hands about the mistaken impression of snowboarding this whole situation would engender while simultaneously talking tough about the IOC and the proud heritage of their "outsider" sport. "I'm not condoning marijuana use, but this is snowboarding we're talking about ... there is a whole culture you know, it is a social phenomenon," was a typical refrain.

Indeed there is a culture, and it's a consumption-intensive one at that, knit tightly together by member-identifying fashions and tastes that carry an explicit aura of rebeliousness, radical outsiderism, and intense devotion to the pursuit of extremes. So what seemed to be so blatantly absent from the coverage I saw was any open proclamation of what a credibility bonanza it was for the above-mentioned culture to have one of its luminaries censured by a faceless, corporately-controlled commission of pee-tasting functionaries (read: fun-hating fuddy-duddies). The sport's acknowledged master, Terje, boycotted the games, claiming that the Olympics are too commercial, and in a sport that values its outsider image, Terje's credibility gains were predictable.

But Ross Rebagliati could have lept beyond this sort of pouty-purist outsider cred and into the kind of transcendentally apodictic credibility that few celebrities ever even have the chance of attaining. All he had to do was admit that he had gotten high at some point prior to his event and that it was none of the Olympic Committee's damn business. Think of the headlines in the snowboarder zines. "Rebagliati Triumphs at Lame-Ass McLympics, Spits in IOC's Face." The snowboarding community would have rallied around him and his endorsement value within that community could have been amortized for a lifetime.

Aye, but there is the best online alice the greenfingers rub: "within that community." Terje boycotted the online unlimited hidden object games games because they are commercialized. Everybody else went to top 100 aveyond game Nagano for the history of turbo fiesta same reason. A dog joint supplement snowboarder who manages to get sponsored by a snowboard company or some baggy-pants manufacturer is like one of the other 130 guys on the PGA tour, the ones you don't know; they're all wearing somebody's logo on their hat but they're still a long way from the big money. But at the Olympics, athletes in sports that are relatively obscure and who will have essentially no "pro" career have a very narrow window of opportunity to make the big money. Think of all the skaters and gymnasts who have tried to sell us shampoo over the years. Look at Mary Lou Retton. She made a lucrative endorsement career out of one appearance at the Olympics. Marc Spitz had his own variety show on national TV, for heaven's sake. Some big dorky guy with a cheesy porn-star moustache wins a few medals and he's welcoming everybody and promising a really special show tonight.

So Ross had no choice but to fight the IOC by claiming that he was a victim of secondhand smoke. Being big in your own community isn't enough. You've got to be able to reach all the kids to sell the Wheaties and that means being able to present yourself as "rad" but not as genuinely radical. Within the context of the Olympics, an athlete can reach a much broader audience and, with a successful appearance, initiate a truly lucrative endorsement career that reaches beyond hawking the accessories of his or her own sport. And Rebagliati is the ideal endorser. He is the spokes-rebel. He brings not only his personal achievements in an Olympic sport to the table, but also the accumulated cachet of deviance of snowboarding itself.

Offering a lame excuse while winking at the cameras is, then, the best strategy for someone like Rebagliati. By putting a sort of Dennis the Menace spin on the loss and subsequent return of his Gold Medal, he manages to gracefully combine the ever more tenuous cachet of the Olympics with the highly purified form of deviance simulation that snowboarding represents. The result is a carefully circumscribed form of rebellion, one that enjoys the approval of some official sanctioning authority while appearing to disrespect the administrators of that authority. Like Dennis Rodman, who loves the game but can't respect David Stern.

And so we get the little rebels, the wild ones who don't care who they piss off, they're just going to slam a Dew. But could that other Ross I imagined, Ross "roll me another" Rebagliati, have been utilized in some form by Mass Marketing, Inc.?

Since before the Marlboro Man, advertising has attempted to capitalize on the credibility enjoyed by outsiders and rebels, two signifiers whose forms must be constantly adjusted as the limits of perceived normality fluctuate. Attempting to capitalize on the credibility of a successful athlete who is also an admitted stoner will probably appear to the advertising industry as either destabilizing or worthless: destabilizing because such a spokes-rebel extends too far and too rapidly the limits of what is acceptably deviant; worthless because a rebeliousness that is too genuine may appear so idiosyncratic as to refuse translation into the universal grammar of advertising. Let us consider both scenarios.

Ross Rebagliati wins the gold at Nagano only to have the medal taken away by the IOC. Having already made deals with certain corporations for endorsements, Ross determines that he will simply admit to some snowboard-culture-necessary T.H.C.-exposure and tell the IOC to fuck off. Imagine that we have intercepted reports prepared by two separate marketing firms on the effectiveness of the pro-marijuana, no-bullshit spokes-rebel Ross Rebagliati.

REPORT #1:

While the initial reaction to a campaign featuring the hemp-friendly Ross is projected to be wildly successful despite some boycotting by groups advocating draconian parental control of youth consumption habits, the ultimate effect of such a campaign on the industry as a whole would be devastating. Such a campaign would, in our opinion, open an irreparable seam in the fabric of marketing space-time, a seam that would open so wide that everything would fall into it. If a handsome, successful athlete were to toss away a medal won during the historic first appearance of his sport in the Olympics, admit drug use, and simply shrug it all off as "my lifestyle, man," any advertising deployed persuant to these events and featuring said handsome athlete as spokes-rebel would in toto be the hydrogen bomb of advertising.

Deployment of such advertising would force the hand of competing firms and an escalation of forces would rapidly ensue. Pursuing this line of thought, we polled our focus groups in order to determine what level of competitor/spokes-rebel lifestyle debaucherie would be necessary to counteract the positive associations engendered by our Rebagliati products.

Drawing upon the images of noted "rebel" celebrities Andre Agassi and Dennis Rodman, we found that our focus groups reacted favorably to these celebrities in opposition to Rebagliati only when a) Mr. Rodman was depicted sporting a broad "Afro" style haircut and presenting symptoms of advanced addiction to heroin, and when b) Mr. Agassi was depicted as a card-carrying member of NAMBLA. In both cases, while the deviance credibilty of the spokes-rebels went up, their corresponding personal association quotient went down.

We speculate that, thanks to the current cultural level of irony-awareness, the industry could sustain for perhaps 3 to 5 years a continuous escalation of the self-destructive outsider-credibility of the various spokes-rebels with the mass suicide of nearly all celebrity endorsers being the final result (Michael Jordan is of course exempt from such a course, given the spectating public's irony-free association of Jordan with the Deity).

Consequently, we recommend that, for the sake of his own career and the industry as a whole, Mr. Rebagliati cop a plea and brace himself for some position-solidifying humor administered by our operative, Jay Leno.

Report #2:

Since our final disposition on this issue is to some degree counter-intuitive, we think it best if we begin with a very brief overview of the marketing/advertising/consumption cycle as we currently understand it. Assume that Mr. Rebagliati is our spokes-rebel and that he has publicly advocated both the recreational use of marijuana and the IOC's self-administered fucking, how effective would Mr. Rebagliati be on behalf of our client?

We are agreed that snowboarding represents rebeliousness as a "lifestyle" wonderfully. Advertising makes use of this lifestyle representation by positioning the product we are marketing as an accoutrement of rebellion. The product is positioned so as to simulate deviance, and by using it, the consumer can simulate his or her own deviance while still having a real life. Nothing is risked or lost or committed. But, and this is our ultimate finding, a spokes-rebel who is in some sense a genuine rebel would be of no use to us. Let us break the process down into some of its constituent parts:

1. Ad features spokes-rebel.
2. You admire spokes-rebel and outsider lifestyle.
3. Thanks to mysterious brain activities parallel with but exterior to rational thought, product featured in ad is homeopathically imbued with spokes-rebel's personal aura.
4. Again, through poorly understood processes of subconscious induction, the consumer associates product with possibility of demonstrating that he or she is likewise a rebel.

Now, for this last step to be possible, the qualities that identify the spokes-rebel as a rebel must be formally recognizable without presenting any intimation of some underlying ideological content, otherwise the possiblity of successful spokes-rebel/consumer identification is slim. We are concerned that, when placed into the above process, rebel credentials like Mr. Rebagliati's could not be properly circumscribed, and he would therefore fail to act as the sign for deviance or rebellion or youth or luxury or whatever as such and would instead appear simply as himself: Idiosyncratically complex, cute and conflicted. The circuit that leads from personality association to product consumption is shorted.

I am inclined to agree with the second report. Celebrities who actually have something to say don't stay famous for long, unless they enter politics, a realm within which you are expected, for the sake of entertainment, to commit to one side or the other. As The Baffler's "Commodified Deviance, Inc." puts it, what's being sold is the simulacrum of deviance, not the real thing. A spokes-rebel who pauses between sips of Gatorade to comment on the U.S. government's callous welfare policy would just be too irreducibly individual and unique to be readily interchangeable with the consumer/spectator's own persona via the above mentioned fantasy logic of product endorsement. But everybody wants to be like Mike. Even Republicans.