Illustration: Kieron Black

As part of our week-long celebration of British snowboarding, we thought it fitting to revisit the closest thing we’ve ever had to an Urban Legend – one that sparked furious debate and finger-pointing after it appeared in the letters page of Whitelines back in 2002.

We re-opened this particular X(crament)-File in 2011 as part of our 100th Issue celebrations, but got no closer to solving the mystery. Now, after almost fifteen years, Ed Leigh finally lifts the lid on an unexplained phenomenon…

Click here to see The Mystery Turd. Proceed with caution though – it’s NSFW and definitely ain’t pretty!

We’ve all done one, so don’t deny it: a shit so big and hard that you can’t actually push it out because your ring-piece is expanded like sausage skin to absolute breaking point. The muscle that contracts and pushes the faeces from your anus like a woman birthing a child becomes paralysed from near-catastrophic expansion, and all you can do is sit and wait for gravity to do its work. At the end of this process you are left with the biggest and most pristine mould of your lower intestine you are ever likely to see.

The British philospher Alain De Botton once wrote “It is in dialogue with pain that most beautiful things find their value,” and thus an Angel Shit or Immaculate Crap (as they are commonly known because there is no need for toilet paper) is revered as the most magnificent of anal creations. Most of the time Angels share a private relationship with their creators, but the London Ski Show in 2002 is memorable for the presence of an unflushable, unbanishable log.

“Like a town crier, Chris Moran returned shortly after it had been deposited and declared it ‘the closest you’ll ever get to seeing a monster’”

Like a town crier, Chris Moran returned shortly after it had been deposited and declared it “the closest you’ll ever get to seeing a monster” and thus word of this grotesque, impossibly huge bowel leviathan spread. An orderly queue quickly formed, with Stu Brass charging an admission fee to view the beached brown whale in the less-than-salubrious cubicle of Kensington Olympia.

The identity of the creator has up until now been a mystery, but I can reveal here exclusively to Whitelines readers that the legendary Ski Show Shit is now more famous in British snowboarding than the man whose ruined intestines created it. Spencer Claridge was a brilliant rider in his prime, one of Britain’s finest, but sadly from this point forth his graceful McTwists and claim to landing the first back rodeo 7 on European soil will forever be eclipsed by the fact that he fathered the Ski Show Shit.

N.B. This shit is not to be confused to the one laid by Gumby on the run in to the kicker in 2004 that by the fourth day had created a skid mark all the way onto the jump itself.