Juggling Skier Conquers Double Diamond At Grand Targhee, WY

Cronquist has pulled countless eyeballs to his Instagram page this ski season, where he displays an inhuman ability to combine juggling with skiing. In his videos, he spins, flips(!), and charges down the slopes while keeping track of his now-iconic pink clubs.

While watching Cronquist's trip down Bobcat, I audibly laughed, shook my head, and then muttered: "What the ****?" As someone who spends way too much time consuming ski content—both during work and in my personal life—it takes something pretty rowdy to get that reaction out of me. Cronquist's stunts regularly fit that bill, though.

It is challenging to categorize his approach within the broader world of skiing. Technically, ski juggling (skuggling?) falls under the umbrella of freeskiing, but it's a far cry from the double and triple corks you see on FIS slopestyle courses.

Yet, I'd put Cronquist's athletic feats alongside those of our favorite, more traditional professional skiers. I'm not alone. Beneath the video of Cronquist's legendary skuggle backflip, a freeskiing judge wrote, "I judge around 5000 ski tricks a year. And this fits pretty comfortably in my top 1!!"

In the past few decades, skiing has rapidly evolved in terms of technique and gear, glomming onto and absorbing or discarding novel approaches to the sport. Ski ballet, while vestigial in some modern skiers' styles, is a notable example of a skiing subgenre we tend to forget.

One trend that didn't end up in the dustbin, known loosely as "new wave," is challenging to capture in a few words, so I'll distill it into a few defining traits: track pants, scarves, butters, and an emphasis on style over trick technicality.

The Bunch—a crew of skiers who championed "new wave" early on—took on the role of iconoclasts as they, among others, pushed to alter the way skiing looks fundamentally, ditching their poles and tricking unconventional objects like trash cans.

They had haters, of course, but 10-odd years after the Bunch first endeavored to shake things up, their impact on the sport is undeniable. Once a niche crew plugging away in their respective corner of skiing, the Bunch now owns a popular ski brand—1000 Skis—and their "look" has been co-opted and eventually remixed by countless skiers. As Matt Sklar wisely wrote in an essay on the subject of "new wave" for Newschoolers seven years ago, "It is the outskirts and the outsiders that change a scene," not "The Olympics."

Cronquist now occupies a similar position. He, like the Bunch did, is doing something new and doing it really, really well. Whether or not his skuggling alters the trajectory of skiing remains an open question, and, realistically, it might be silly to suggest that juggling clubs will suddenly become commonplace at ski resorts.

I'm not sure the answer matters all that much to Cronquist, though—he seems to be having plenty of fun doing his own thing, which, in the end, is the skiing trend that'll never die.