Gotta say, Fringes Folly called it! And I quote, from Clif Bars official statement: We understand that some climbers feel these forms of climbing are pushing the sport to new frontiers. But we no longer feel good about benefitting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error; where there is no safety net. Or, as FF surmised: Still, I doubt that Clif Bar is dropping its top soloists to try and stay truer to some sort of anti-commercialist roots. My guess is that what’s closer to the truth is that Clif Bar is having some misgivings about feeling complicit in encouraging good people to pursue risky activities. I’m not sure that using soloists such as Alex Honnold to sell your product is something that would sit easily with me, if I owned Clif Bar – either. While it’s a question we don’t like to ask (because we don’t like to ask hard questions), if you’re Gary Erickson, the owner of Clif Bar, you have to ask yourself how you would feel if your top athlete were to die in the course of doing something you had promoted and financially encouraged him to do. If you ask that question of yourself, I think it’s easy to imagine feeling some consternation over it. Fringes Folly understands and, believe it or not, stand behind Clif Bar who is getting all kind of flack right now for being too mainstream. Not an easy decision to make, but an admirable one. See the original piece here: fringesfolly/2014/11/08/clif-bar-drops-honnold-and-others-for-free-soloing/
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 19:21:55 +0000
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