On a high ridge, a line of bare trees melt into a blur as a woman and a man skate ski in unison, silhouetted against the winter sun. She's sleek, hard, and moves unbelievably fast on snow. Uphill. He matches every lung bursting thrust of pole and thigh, filming each pole and glide. The trail swoops down, but he stays with her; sixty, seventy, eighty kilometres per hour. He's skiing backwards.Who are these guys anyways? Peel off the painted-on-tight designer riot-coloured ski suits and place them in regular clothes at their day jobs, and you'll find mild-mannered Lise Meloche and David McMahon. But don't let appearances fool you.
Meloche and McMahon are a bona fide, dynamic duo whose mission in life is to take the standard wool-knickered, walk-in-the-woods granola image of cross country skiing, a sport often grouped with hiking and carriage riding, and drag it, screaming and kicking if necessary, into a new realm.
If Meloche and McMahon have their way, cross-country skiing and other "clean oxygen fed sports" (a term they've trademarked) will rank up there with the darlings of the winter commercial kingdom, skiing and snowboarding. And while they're at it they plan to drag biathlon, trail running, triathlon, biking, and rowing out of the shadows as well.
They're own credentials are impressive. Out on the ski trails, casually pulling 360s on her ultra skinny sticks, Meloche plays Jinks to McMahon's James Bond. Both have skied to the top in the almost unknown world of cross-country racing. She owns 7 world cup medals, one of them gold; he's a national biathlon champion and together, they've, please pick one: A) formed an outdoor endurance sport film house à la Warren Miller, B) built a team of national level endurance athletes, C) founded an athletic movement based on lung power.
The film house, WWW.XCZONE.TV, where McMahon, a former figure skater, combines athleticism and artistry to promote lung-powered sports is definitely D) all of the above. XCZONE.TV can calls upon any of a number of national and Olympic athletes to fill out their cast. Their most recent effort is a biography of Olympic Medallist Beckie Scott, a CD that profiles her fantastic performance at the 2001 World Cross Country Skiing Championships at Salt Lake City.
At their home base in Chelsea, Quebec, McMahon and Meloche are now in post production on their most ambitious production yet, "Unlimited". For it they crisscrossed the country, filming the best endurance athletes in cross-country skiing, trail running, triathlon, inline skating, mountain biking, rowing, telemark skiing, roller skiing, cycling, paddling, and adventure racing. It's new territory, you'll never look at these sports quite the same way.
The Banff Film Festival finalist, High Velocity, an earlier effort in which McMahon used the film noire genre and a cast of Olympians to search for skiing?s true soul, does for cross country what the 1950s film "Let's Go Skiing with Warren Miller" did for alpine skiing. For one chase scene, McMahon hangs from a chopper skid filming cross-country skiers shredding a double diamond, with rifle slung over their shoulders.
If anything, McMahon is Canada's Warren Miller minus the millions of dollars. "What he did isn't lost on us," says McMahon who uses the latest lightweight, unobtrusive and highly mobile resolution digital video and 16mm to produce high quality images. "Technically we?re ahead of the game."
Still money is tight. Unlike downhill skiing, the endurance sports aren't about to go big time commercial anytime soon.
"There's easier ways to make money in film," says McMahon. Even so, he does what he can to support cash strapped athletes, and proceeds from the Scott film go directly to supporting the Olympic champion.
Still in the end, it will never be about the money for this ski-struck pair.
"It's never been about exploiting the sport we love," McMahon says. "If we can bring a little colour, some pizzazz to the winter landscape and help some of the power endurance sports break out, and break even in the process, we've succeeded,"
