Women of winter

SQUAW VALLEY - During filming for Matchstick Productions' 2004 release "Yearbook," Ingrid Backstrom sped down 1,500 vertical feet on a Bella Coola, British Columbia peak in a mere three turns, topping Shane McConkey's six-turn run on the same steep a year before.

The clip became featured in a Helly Hansen promotional DVD, which mistakenly cast Backstrom's run as Hugo Harrison, a Canadian skier recognized by Skiing Magazine as one of the top-25 skiers in the world. In other words, Backstrom skied so fast that she not only looked like a guy - she tricked a company into thinking she was Harrison.

"I was watching and stopped and said, 'Wait, that's me,'" Backstrom said. "It was a compliment."

A time may be approaching when skiing like a man may become a compliment of the past for female skiers. Many women hope it will be replaced with - 'Wow, you skied that like Ingrid' or Jenn Berg, Jamie Burge, Jessica Sobolowski or Michelle Parker.

Sure, Kim Reichhelm, Kristen Ulmer, Allison Gannett, Wendy Fisher and others pioneered the extreme skiing landscape decades ago, but a new crop of women athletes is pushing the boundaries further, changing the attitude toward female skiers in a male-dominated industry.

"I think the talent's improving," said Reichhelm, who starred in Greg Stump's 1989 film "License to Thrill." "The way the women and big mountain skiers in particular are getting after it - they are stepping it up from the stuff we were doing."

To keep up with that trend, companies are sponsoring more female skiers. Mechura said K2 has tripled the number of women it sponsored 10 years ago. Salomon has diversified its female athletes to keep up with the changes in skiing, Salomon spokesperson Sierra Domaille said. Now it sponsors freestyle skiers like Jen Hudak and Tahoe's Anik Demers, who competes in skiercross events.

The trend in ski products and sponsorship, however, has not translated into increased visibility for female freeskiers. Film companies like Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick Productions still only feature one to three females in each film, which in the case of TGR usually includes 15 skiers.

Women may have taken the largest step forward in this year's Warren Miller film, "Impact." There are 17 female skiers in the film, including Backstrom and Berg, who star in the two women-only "Warren's Angels" heliskiing segments shot in Deer Valley, Utah, and Girdwood, Alaska.

"I think there are more girls out there who are pushing it, but I haven't seen the growth in terms of the backing of the industry," Berg said. "There's not 70 percent guys in films and 30 percent girls. It's still 93 percent guys. If you ask me in 10 years, I think that will have changed."

Some, including a few of the girls mentioned here, worry that sex may also play a role in a future increase in exposure. It already has in other sports as Anna Kournikova in tennis and Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, who posed in the men's magazine FHM this summer, have illustrated. Many skiers point to a recent Freeskier magazine spread that showed female skiers in bikinis rather than ski gear as an example of the focus on sex at the expense of athletic ability.

"It's still a male-dominated industry and they control it," Jamie Burge said. "Every guy's fantasy is to see a hot chick rip - someone they can date and ski with."

Former filmmaker Eric Perlman, who featured Kristen Ulmer in his "Extreme Skiing" series during the 1990s, disagreed.

"If you refine your body and achieve athletic success, you're good looking," Perlman said, adding that a skier could have an imperfection like a big nose and still be attractive because of their athleticism.

"Form follows function," he said.

Whether it's sex, women's specific marketing or a slow rise in visibility, women's skiing continues to make gains in a male-dominated industry. Most professionals, however, stop short of saying it has arrived, and almost all say it still has a lot of room to expand.

"It's growing, but not on the scale it should," Burge said. "There should be full-on women's videos just for ... that just women want to watch and get stoked on. That's where we need to be."