Off-piste

The JC gets all figurative Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Metaphor Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

The JC loves skiing. Say what you like about his privileged, stale, pale, male, out-of-touch ass. I have mixed feelings about the “off-piste” metaphor.

In skiing it means to ski away from commercial ski-fields — typically, like miles away from them, and lifts, cafes and so on; ski-touring, with skins, avalanche gear, a rucksack and a day’s worth of food, spending more time walking up than skiing down. This is awesome, of course, but but more narrowly, being off-piste means skiing on commercial skifields, using normal lifts, cafes and what not, but just keeping away from the actually groomed, marked out runs.

For dilettantes like the JC this is less dangerous, less hard work, and a lot easier than country ski-touring. Still it requires the technique to deal with powder, crud, moguls, avoiding trees and whatnot. This is technique that 90% of skiers don’t have, and as a result, they stick to the pistes.

Okay, some maths. If one quarter of the skiable area of a given ski-field is pisted, that means there is three times as much unpisted skiing. If 90% of skiers at any time are on a piste — I have no data but I reckon this is conservative — then the pisted slopes are