The following article was originally printed in the December 2023 Issue of Slush. To access the full article click here.
Do you remember who your first favorite snowboarder was?
For me, it was Stefi Luxton. I’d see her at the skatepark in Wānaka all the time, and she’d talk to me. Then I'd see her up at Snow Park NZ, ripping.
As you're working toward qualifying for your first Olympics in 2018, who were you competitive with on a national level? Was it a straightforward qualifier?
The year that I qualified for the Olympics, the only other girl on the team was Christy Prior. In my opinion, at the time, she was the best female snowboarder in the world. But she was injured, so it was just me.
And though you didn’t place very high in slopestyle that first Olympics—13th, to be exact—you got bronze in that Big Air. You became the youngest New Zealand Winter Olympics medalist, but only for a day, right?
Only for two hours, I think. Crazy.
What's up with that? Were you pissed?
No, haha. Nico [Porteous] and I grew up together in Wānaka riding Snow Park and Cardrona, and we medaled on the same day—both 16 years old—and made New Zealand history. It was really cool. Our friends at home were hyped, haha.
Yeah, you held it down for two hours. But then you got to be the flag bearer in the closing ceremony. How does that work? How do you get hit up to be a flag bearer?
Someone hints at it at first, because everyone knows except you. I guess I broke the 26-year medal drought for NZ, so I was picked. New Zealand has a small team, but we’ve got a lot of heart, so it felt pretty special getting picked.
Following that 2018 Olympics, the industry at large seemed to collectively take note to themselves, like, “This Zoi Sadowski Synnott from New Zealand has something special”… And then going into 2019, you started to go on a crazy winning streak.
Yeah, it was the season after the Olympics. I didn't really think too much of it. I just learned a couple of new tricks in New Zealand. I got invited to X Games for Big Air following my previous year at the Olympics, and I was listed as a second alternate for Slopestyle.
I somehow managed to come second in Big Air. The following day, I found out thirty minutes before the slopestyle comp started that Klaudia Medlova and Jamie Anderson had to pull out, and then I somehow won. And then following that, I won World Champs, which was crazy because I hit my head in my second round of quallies, got so concussed, and wasn't competing in finals. I qualified in first from my first run in qualis, and then they canceled the comp, and I became World Champ.
True. In Park City, was it?
Yeah. And then following that, I somehow managed to win the US Open that season. And yeah, that just felt like the start of it.
I love your use of the word “somehow.” You’re just really good! There must have been a lot of hype in 2019; that starts to build. How do you start to manage that?
Yeah, well, at the end of that season, I was like, ‘Damn, I feel like I got lucky at every single comp to end up on the top of the podium.’ It was weird; I didn't feel like I earned it in a way. I’m a perfectionist, and still to this day, for me, it doesn’t matter what the result is; it’s my riding that I care most about, the tricks I do in a run, how I grab a certain trick, even how I snowboard between features, stuff like that. So I didn’t think too much of the pressure or hype or anything.
So how would you quantify the desire to do great things? And is that simply something you want for yourself, to know that you did your best possible run? Or is it for the sake of snowboard history? Where does that drive come from?
Hard question haha, I think it's everything. For myself, I like to have a purpose, so I set goals. And what motivates me to try and reach those goals is knowing there are girls out there who are watching X Games and getting hyped and inspired by the progression and want to go out and do it themselves.
You have that 2019 crazy run. Then Covid kind of happens, probably puts a bit of a damper on things competitively. Was it stressful to you?
No, not at all. That following season I felt a lot more expectation, and then I didn't perform as well. I don't know what it was haha. And then Covid hit, and I went home, and we had a full lockdown, couldn't leave the house in New Zealand for six straight weeks, and I kinda loved it. I love chilling. I played PlayStation for the first ten days straight, tramp skated, and hung out with my boyfriend.
What was your PlayStation game of choice?
Red Dead Redemption. I get addicted to things quickly, haha. It was a nice reset, to be honest. It was all kind of a lot for a kid. I was 19 at the time. I'd been traveling so much away from home, from friends and family, and then I was forced to just go home and chill. I was just like, sweet, I'm just going to do absolutely nothing. I had a lot of time to look back at my season and plan for the next year. I figured out my goals for the next comp season and planned to do a little more filming in the backcountry. I got to do a trip to Japan the previous winter with Burton filming for One World, so I was wanting to feed that addiction.
Yeah, so I guess, I'm curious to talk a little about that, how you start to ride pow. Did you feel like that was an opportunity granted to you after winning contests? Or was that something you sought out?
It was something I sought out for sure. Before the Natural Selection thing happened, I would freeride whenever I could outside of training down in New Zealand. I did a Freeride World Tour qualifier because I was interested in freeriding, riding pow, and that was the only path I saw being a comp rider, haha. I filmed with Carlos (Garcia-Knight) in NZ for a project he was doing, and then when I got on Burton, they invited me to film too. This was the 19/20 season when Covid hit. Then the following year, I had some clips and heard about Natural Selection looking for riders, so I put together an edit for the wildcard contest.
Totally. Let’s chat about Natural Selection. I think it was a really important moment when they started inviting the modern contest riders. If anything, for all the cynics out there that think the contests kids don’t know how to ride their snowboard outside of a maintained course. But you got in as a wildcard. When you entered into that backcountry competitive setting, was that the desire to win forefront?
No, I just wanted experience and to leave there stoked on my riding. And of course, I hadn't ridden pow since New Zealand the year, or like six months prior, and I'd come straight from X Games and I was just like, fuck, I can't remember how to land in pow, haha. And just every run was just gaining my pow legs back...