On Nov. 15, skiers and snowboarders strutted their way onto campus for the 2nd annual Rail Riot, hitting the rails between OLARA and the nursing building with the best tricks in their arsenal.
Justin Tarasoff, one of the organizers and competitors in the event, said the idea for the Rail Riot came to him in 2021 during his tour of TRU’s Kamloops Campus. “I was doing a campus tour on my first day of school and thought, ‘wow!’ That would be a sweet handrail to ski first snowfall,” he said.
Tarasoff and his friends followed through on his daydream. During the first snowfall of the year, they were out at that stairway packing snow in place and building a drum when campus security kicked them off campus. “Not their fault,” said Tarasoff. “They were just doing their jobs.”
Tarasoff was dedicated to finding a way to ski this rail and found the perfect way to make it happen in 2023. The solution came when he took Billy Collins’ event management class, EVNT 2260, which he highly recommended. “That was my all-time favourite class,” he said.
The class is designed to teach students how to create compelling events from the ground up, and Tarasoff decided to propose organizing a rail jam on campus as his project. “We have great handrails on campus,” he said.
“This year it’s a little bit different, we’re doing it with the TRUSU Out Here Ski & Snowboard Club through the Student Union,” Tarasoff said. “It wasn’t a class project; the insurance is different and the Student Union is now liable. So it was a little bit of a nightmare.”
However, Tarasoff said that TRU and TRUSU have been great to work with and felt that Audrey Trim from the TRU Risk Management Office deserved recognition for her commitment to making their event happen. “She has been amazing to work with getting everything figured out and dialled,” he said. “There were a lot of challenges. They helped us navigate all of them.”
This year’s event was sponsored by a group of companies, large and small, including Redbull, Cooper Rental, Sun Peaks, and local company The Truth Skate and Snow, represented by Truth associate Mikey Wheeler Johnson. Johnson, who works closely with The Truth, said he was impressed by the improvement in the event and the riders from last year.
“Just comparing it to the one we had last year, the level of riding was way higher,” Johnson said. “It’s awesome to see tricks that people were trying at the end of the night last year at the beginning of the night tonight.”
He said the competitors for the night have been practicing off-season, doing dry slope practice at Silver Star and hitting airbag jumps. “Some of these kids are dialled in and ready to go already,” Johnson said, noting that skiing season hasn’t begun yet. “They’re committed to it, and you can see it.”
Tarasoff said that, like last year, this year’s competitors were hand-picked, noting one difference: the number of women riding in the event.
“We had triple the amount of [women] riding the rail this year,” he said. “It was awesome to showcase their talent.”
Looking towards the future, Tarasoff said the ultimate goal is to make the TRU Rail Riot an annual event. “I finally got a clip on this handrail,” he said. “Now, we want it to keep happening. It’s gonna happen, and we’re looking at the same time next year.”