Ethan Deiss
Growing up riding Trollhaugen, WI, Ethan Deiss grew tired of the same features at 100-laps-per hour and took his snowboarding to urban environs. A video part when he was 18 took both his riding and the concept of the web-based full part viral, and has since earned him the right to redefine the road map of a typical snowboard career.
Ethan Deiss went viral in 2009. It wasn’t on purpose. He wasn’t a meme, a campaign or a hashtag. Just a raw talent—infectious snowboarding coming out of somewhere, Wisconsin. Remember that this was before the web-based “full part” became an industry standard. Even in the late 2000s, a rider’s ascent usually went from local video to regional video to national video, from flow team to am team to pro team. It was a logical progression. Nothing viral about it. On the flipside, Mack Dawg Productions had just stepped out of the full length feature game. There was a growing imbalance between the number of talented riders and content producers and the number of mainstream distribution channels for their work. Deiss’ ascent was emblematic of a shifting of the tides—of the Internet making the snowboard video star…