S01E09: Ed Leigh - Broadcaster & Producer. Wānaka

"I pinch myself every day"We recorded this one sitting outside Ed Leigh’s home above Lake Wānaka’s Peninsula Bay. Bought as a bare section by Ed and his wife Sian back in 2019, they’ve built something that is, in his own words, the culmination of their personal and professional lives made real. In addition to the beautiful home and working spaces, there’s a micro skatepark on the driveway - as Ed puts it, it’d be criminal to pour concrete and not bend it up at the corners. Mountain bike trails start ten metres from the gate.Ed Leigh is one of snowboarding’s greatest ever ambassadors, and has become the voice of action sports for a generation of BBC viewers - nine Olympic Games across winter and summer, two decades of their legendary winter sport magazine show Ski Sunday - the commentator who was able to translate the nuances of sports like snowboarding, freeskiing, skateboarding, BMX or surfing into mainstream British living rooms like no other.He’s also co-founder of All Good Productions NZ, host and commentator for the Natural Selection snowboarding tour, and the Commercial Director driving Natural Selection Bike Aotearoa - an eight-year labour of love with sustainability built into its DNA from the ground up.But before all of that, there was a kid in Gloucestershire whose world got turned on its head when he saw his first ollie. He proceeded to get on a train to Swindon every weekend to skate the town’s mini ramp, lost his mind at the concept of “skateboarding on snow” after watching the sport on TV one morning, paid his dues on the local artificial slope (plastic bristles!), found his way to a snowboard shop in Chalford, and spent five winters in Val d’Isère before the busted knee that ended his professional snowboarding career and accelerated his transition into roles such as magazine editor, MC, commentator, producer, and event organiser. A string of live events from festival vert ramps to inner-city snowboard contests inadvertently started his broadcasting apprenticeship, so that by the time the BBC came calling in 2005, he’d already spent a decade learning how to captivate a mainstream audience without losing the sport’s core.What followed were lives built around the dichotomy of managing absence and maximising presence - relocating the family from Europe to Auckland so Sian could have her parents close while he was gone for the Northern Hemisphere winter, years of January and February without a summer holiday with his kids, a Red Bull contract that pulled them back to Europe and three formative years in Verbier, and eventually the return to Aotearoa, this time to Wānaka, and to something that finally feels permanent.We cover what it means to be an industry lifer; saying yes to too much and rocking in the bath wondering how it all went wrong; what it takes to build a life and maintain a marriage across opposite hemispheres; straddling the conservative world of mainstream broadcasting and the action sports culture that made you; what snowboarding gained and lost by going Olympic; and why, thirty years on, he’s still going sideways fast and bending the concrete up at the corners. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com