I was shaken up when I heard Shane McConkey was dead. I wasn’t expecting the knot in my stomach. I wasn’t expecting my first thoughts to be of his young daughter. I had never known him outside of a chance encounter and didn’t expect to be emotionally affected on that level. As the news started to spread, I received the same shaken reactions from skiers who had never met him. I wondered why before realizing that, as skiers we are all connected to Shane, and the debt we owe him cannot be understated. I’m not here to write his obituary, but to give him more than a simple R.I.P. by acknowledging the personal debt I owe him for revolutionizing my life.
It is indisputable that Shane did more to revolutionize ski design than anyone in the history of the sport. Every time I step into a pair of skis, every time I go skiing, every time I have the best day of my life, it’s a direct result of Shane’s impact on how skis are built.
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you Shane was my childhood hero because he wasn’t. I’m too young, and the skiers I consider heroes were the ones that looked up to him. But to me Shane and his relentless positivity always embodied what skiing should be. Fun. Fresh. Exciting. He lived skiing, and skiing lived through him.
What I admire most in Shane is that he was the absolute best at being himself. He lived life doing what he loved, he was the best he could be at it, and it was just a coincidence that his best was better than almost anyone else. People who are the best at something while being themselves are almost always doing something that has never been done before. They are the people that change everything. Freeskiing has lost some great humans, but none who have contributed as much to the sport as Shane did, and it will be impossible to forget him.
