Oh dear God. If this is what we’re subjected to when the Daily Mail covers snowboarding, we’d rather they went back to their ‘Ban This Killer Craze’ campaign of 1992. While this is less offensive than their usual scaremongering about asylum-seeking swine-flu-carrying wind turbines on benefits, it’s still bullshit on every level.

Let’s forego the fact that this ‘news’ is out of date by several months – the shots featured were originally released to promote The Art Of Flight, and were published in WL back in 2010 – and soldier on. Somehow Mark Landvik, Travis Rice and John Jackson have become the first riders to “conquer [a] VERTICAL Alaskan slope”. So…. they fell of a cliff then? Not quite – the article goes on to say that the slope was 50 degrees. Geometry was never our strong suit, but you don’t need a protractor to know that the DM could have done with being held back a year. And as for it being a “world record”? Xavier de le Rue rides steeper slopes than this in his sleep. Icy ones at that.

As is always the case with Mail articles, the “intrepid trio” of “speedsters” (Christ…) have generated some pretty fascinating comments, ranging from the pig-ignorant (“if you actually think this is an achievement to shout about you really need to get out more…remember gravity did most of the work for them”) to the utterly bonkers (“Stupid, stupid, Stupid… setting of an avalanche and hurting other people, or putting they rescuers danger just to have some fun did obviously not occur to those silly men. How ignorant we are, calling such irresponsible behaviour fun…”).

We could go on, but we’d be here all day, so head over to the Mail to see the rest of the article. Former Whitelines editor Chris Moran, in his legendary ‘don’t call it boarding’ rant from 2007, said it best: “The Daily Mail newspaper was originally conceived in order to count the number of cunts in the kingdom. The figure is printed on the front under ‘circulation’.'”….