I. THE PRELUDE

This was my first Olympics.

The night I applied for the Olympics was Halloween weekend, 2024—exactly one year and 4 months before the thing itself. I was in Bend surprising Gabe Ferguson with the cover of SLUSH, celebrating hard enough to justify poor decisions, when Annie Fast asked if I’d sent in my Olympic paperwork. I shrugged, the universal gesture of a man who absolutely has not, and by 10 p.m., still dressed like a Mad Max extra, I was hunched over a laptop racing a deadline I had just learned existed.

Months went by. Nothing. No confirmation. No rejection. Just silence. Mark Clavin mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d gotten his approval at Snowboard Magazine. A straightforward title. Clean. Olympic-friendly. I couldn’t help but wonder if that had something to do with it. I followed up. Annie passed along a contact. I reached out. More silence. The FOMO crept in. The slow, dull pressure of knowing the biggest event in snowboarding was happening without you.

I’d already skipped China. During COVID, the Beijing Olympics felt less like a sporting event and more like a post-apocalyptic fever dream, and I couldn’t convince anyone to cover lodging or travel anyway. Commercial flights were limited, rules were changing daily, and the logistics alone outweighed the appeal of experiencing the end of the world early. I figured there would be plenty of that in my lifetime. Passing felt like the right call.

But this was Italy. So I persisted. Followed up again. And eventually, months later, a reply. 

Other publications had dropped out. Maybe Curling Monthly folded. Maybe the system glitched. Whatever the reason, I was in. Paperwork resubmitted. Credential approved. A small miracle arrived in the mail in a rectangular envelope.

Then the emails started rolling in. Slick. Impressive. Overly cheerful. One in particular stood out: an invitation to sign up for a guided tour of the Olympic Athlete Village in Milan. A real selling point, apparently. Based on everything I’d heard, the village is essentially a hastily constructed dorm complex where the world’s most finely tuned bodies are compressed into a hormonal pressure cooker of cardboard beds and unfulfilled dreams. Best-case scenario: maybe second base. And yet the Olympic Committee was very keen to let me know I could sign up for this sacred experience—on one specific day. February 5th. Weirdly important.

The reality was I wouldn’t see Milan at all. I would be in Livigno, one of the remote outposts of this Olympics, where they tucked all of the freestyle snowboarding and skiing: Big Air, slopestyle, halfpipe, boardercross, moguls, slaloms.

I left my house on February 4th. A route designed by someone who hates the concept of joy—San Diego to Detroit to Amsterdam to Zurich, followed by five separate trains to a town called Zernez, where, allegedly, a Burton van would collect me and deliver my sleep-deprived body to Livigno. 

Quaint natural-wood houses slide by, lakes stacked beneath mountains that look less scenic and more disciplinary, like they’re in charge of the whole country. I put on a documentary about the Miracle on Ice to try and manufacture some Olympic pride, the way you eat oranges when you feel a cold coming on. I’d be lying if I said the Olympics hadn’t always sort of—well—reeked to me. Like the kind of establishment snowboarding wasn’t supposed to bow to. These contests happen a dozen times a year with the same cast of characters, the same tricks with new names, but the difference here is the public appeal. The kind of thing my parents think is exciting. For two and a half weeks, what we do becomes something they can explain to their friends without using their hands.

When I finally escape the tube trains, I’m picked up by Niki, the European Team Manager for Burton, and immediately funneled through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint. I’m not entirely sure what we’re being protected from. I’ll be staying with the Burton marketing crew, which, in truth, is a miracle upgrade. The accommodations will be nicer than anything I could ever afford on SLUSH’s budget. I mean I would just have written this story from home had it not been for them. The drive through the Alps continues as Nikki tells me you can’t get on a ski lift here without a helmet, like, legally. He says there are so many cops in Livigno it feels like a military base with après-ski.

I make it into the crowded town of Livingio just as Big Air practice is starting before qualifiers. The drop-in towers loom like steel dinosaurs, glowing in the dark, and the spotlights comb the mountains the way prison guards check a fence line. Here it is. The circus. I’ve made it.

II. Field Notes From the Hallucination

Listen. We’ll get to the contests and the scores and the whole televised carnival soon enough. But this isn’t really that kind of story. This is more a recollection of what it’s like to actually be at the Olympics, or at least this one, long enough for the adrenaline to wear off and the weirdness to set in. These are the observations that stacked up along the way. The stray thoughts. The background radiation. Think of it as mood-setting. It will make the part with the runs and the scores you all watched on TV make a little more sense.

On Corona: 

One of the first ironies to reveal itself is the Olympic Corona sponsorship. A bold piece of image rehab, given that the Beijing Olympics treated that word like a biological hazard. Now it’s plastered everywhere. Banners, lanyards, the side of the jump. History moves fast. Marketing moves faster.

The Judges Group Chat:

Somewhere over the Atlantic I’d been added to a group chat with the other members of the media and, more surprisingly, all the judges. I got a real kick out of this. Not because I thought I could sway anything, but because it felt like being invited into something valuable. A conversational token that made me sound like I knew what was going on.

The chat itself was one-way. No responding. No follow up questions. Just information, dropped in like weather reports. At first it lit up every night before an event, and then again afterward, a kind of pregame briefing followed by a postmortem. Before Big Air there were breakdowns of Eli Bouchard’s tricks, notes about why butters had to be done intentionally or they would not score, small clarifications that felt useful, calming even, like someone was trying to keep the whole thing on the rails.

As the days went on, the messages slowed. By the time slopestyle rolled around, the judging chats had gone mostly quiet. I understood it. My own notes were getting worse too. The excitement that starts the whole thing drains out of any sane human three weeks in. Attention frays. Certainty softens. The energy it takes just to keep explaining yourself becomes harder to justify.

The tone throughout was cautious, almost preemptive, like everyone involved was still carrying the anxiety of the China Max Parrot judging debacle and determined to get ahead of any storm before it even formed a cloud. What struck me most was not what the chat explained, but what it revealed. Proximity without participation. Access without influence. The feeling of being close enough to the machinery to hear it humming, but never close enough to touch the controls.

For a minute there, I almost thought the judges were going to stick the landing. 

Hotel Bivio, the Nucleus:

Every trip has one place like this. You don’t plan it. It just happens. One location quietly absorbs gravity until, before you realize it, everyone you’re looking for is already there.

In Livigno, that place was Hotel Bivio.

It sat directly across the street from our house, which helped, but proximity alone doesn’t explain it. Bivio worked because it covered all the bases. People stayed there. People ate there. People killed time there. And, crucially, the most popular club in town lived in the basement, which meant the entire Olympic ecosystem passed through its doors at least once a day whether they intended to or not.

The restaurant was permanently humming, the kind of place that feels open even when it’s technically closed. String lights, loud music, plates landing hard, glasses clinking like someone was always trying to toast away an incoming storm. Lunch blurred into dinner. Dinner blurred into whatever came next. You could show up alone and leave having accidentally joined three conversations you didn’t start.

I’d often run into the McMorris family there, which felt oddly grounding. Amid all the branding, credentials, and inflated stakes, his parents were just… parents. Warm. Curious. Fully present. Proof that even inside the Olympic machine, there are still human-sized pockets where things feel normal for a minute.

If you wanted to find someone, you went to Bivio. If you didn’t want to find anyone, you still went to Bivio. It was the catch-all. Every trip has one. You don’t choose it. The trip chooses it for you.

Rumors and Neurosis: 

By day two the rumors were moving fast. With that much energy and pressure packed into one place, collective neurosis becomes palpable. No one seems quite sure what is real anymore.

Word went around that the tap water might be contaminated. Norovirus. E. coli. Something biblical. Suddenly every conversation sounded like a medical podcast. I had no idea what was true, so I made a personal executive decision and started drinking non-alcoholic Corona Ceros instead of water. Hydration, but with branding.

Then came what might be the most bewildering story of the entire Olympics. A rumor so absurd it sounded like an Onion headline until the governing bodies had to address it on the record. Whispers spread that some ski jumpers might be injecting hyaluronic acid into their penises to manipulate body measurements used for suit sizing. A slightly larger suit, the theory went, could mean marginally more lift in flight.

The World Anti Doping Agency said it would look into the claims if evidence emerged. Ski jumping’s federation called it a wild rumor. But the fact that everyone in the valley was openly discussing Penisgate, complete with aerodynamic theories and hushed laughter, felt like the purest expression of the mania the Olympics can generate.

At one point, several beers deep, I remember joking that I was so full I could only take another pint if it was injected directly into my crotch. 

The Opening Ceremony that wasn’t:

This was the first moment where it really clicked that the Olympics are not built for the people standing near them. They are built for the people watching them.

The morning of the opening ceremony our little corner of the Games was buzzing. Word spread that there would be a remote ceremony happening at the venue. People talked about it over coffee like we might just wander over and take it in.

Then we found out there were no tickets. No access. No standing room. Nothing. You could not get in. It was baffling in a very specific way, the kind where you realize the thing you thought was public is actually just a set. The ceremony was happening, but not for us. Not really.

That is when it hit me that being at the Olympics in person is a lot like getting to watch your favorite TV show being filmed. You are near it. You can hear the cues. You can see the lights and the movement and the machinery. But the magic is aimed somewhere else. The performance is calibrated for the lens, not the room. The curtain gets pulled back, and what you are left with is a lot of scaffolding and choreography and people in headsets making sure the timing lands for an audience that is not you.

So we did what you do when you realize something is better on screen. We went to the Burton store at MTR, which by that point had already established itself as a daily refuge. We sat down, cracked Coronas, and watched the ceremony the way it was intended to be watched. On TV.

Hunter Hess and the Political fallout:

One thing that genuinely stayed with me in those opening days was hearing Team USA freestyle skiers Chris Lillis and Hunter Hess say that the actions of ICE agents do not reflect the country they represent. It felt obvious. Not brave in a performative way, just human. The kind of answer you give when someone asks a loaded question and you respond with the baseline setting of having a heart.

What struck me was how little space there was for that kind of response. Hess was essentially baited into answering, put in a position where silence would read as endorsement and honesty would read as defiance. He chose honesty. And for that, the backlash came fast. Online outrage. Cable news spin. The President calling him a loser, which somehow felt both surreal and entirely predictable.

I do not ski. I do not always give skiers their flowers. But in that moment I remember thinking, thank God someone said it. Not because it was radical, but because it was grounded. Because it acknowledged that athletes are still people, and that representing a country does not mean cosigning every action carried out in its name.

At the same time, I could not ignore the silence from our own side of the fence. From snowboarding, a culture that once prided itself on being allergic to authority, there was almost nothing. No pushback. No discomfort. No real anti establishment instinct showing its face. I kept thinking about Terje. About the way he stood up to the Olympics when it actually cost something to do so.

Slalom, Boardercross, and the Unfortunate Truth:

One of the more humbling realizations I had at this Olympics was that the most popular snowboard events were the ones with the least snowboarding mythology attached to them. Slalom. Boardercross. Races. No spins. No style debates. Just who gets downhill first.

Parallel slalom was absolute mayhem, in the best possible way. Ten thousand people on a hillside screaming like they were watching a penalty shootout. Signs everywhere. Cowbells. Flags. People losing their minds over hundredths of a second. And it clicked almost immediately why. You do not need an explainer. You do not need to understand switch takeoffs or grab variations or why a frontside 18 is harder than a backside one. You just watch two people race and one of them wins. Even your uncle gets it.

Someone pointed out that the crowd was bigger than Big Air. That stung a little, but it also made perfect sense. It was during the day. You could see the whole course. No strobe lights. No scaffolding drama. Just bodies moving fast and a finish line that meant something. In a Games where we keep trying to explain freestyle snowboarding to the world like it is a thesis defense, the thing people responded to most was a race.

Boardercross hit the same nerve. Loud. Chaotic. Aggressive. A contact sport disguised as a snowboard event. And somehow, somewhere along the way, Nick Baumgartner became our guy. At first it was ironic. Then it wasn’t. I found myself yelling, placing fake bets, genuinely stressed when he was in a heat. I asked him for a selfie. I tried to convince him to come ride powder with us like we were old friends. 

We spend so much time trying to make freestyle snowboarding legible to the Olympics. Polishing it. Framing it. Explaining why it matters. And yet the events that made the biggest noise were the ones that needed no translation at all. Just speed. Just competition. Just a finish line.

Inside the Corral:

In general, the Olympics reward confidence. If you walk like you belong somewhere, most of the time you do. Inside the corral you can drift between sections on posture alone, a credential hanging just visible enough, eyes forward, no sudden movements. As long as you don’t run into a real goody-two-shoes type of worker, which was rare, you can kind of exist wherever momentum takes you.

One night that changed was women’s pipe finals.

Security tightened up in a way that was impossible to miss. Earlier in the week I could wander freely with barely a glance. Tonight there were checks, pauses, head tilts. I am fairly certain this had everything to do with Snoop Dogg being in the building.

“Sweet Caroline” played, as it always seemed to at each event, while a small but committed American section sang along like it was a civic duty. A light snowfall drifted in and out of the strobes, flakes lighting up like static. Halfpipe under the lights is a different animal. Everything feels closer. Louder. More fragile.

Then Snoop Dogg appeared, holding a little handheld gimbal camera, waving it around like a stoned college kid at his first festival. The energy shifted immediately. Very “I am here for content.” Phones went up. Shoulders squared. The Olympics doing what they do best, turning presence into proof.

Thoughts on Snoop Dogg:

Snoop Dogg at the Olympics.

Maybe it was the political callouts. Maybe it was just the context. Maybe it was the realization that something I assumed would exist purely as a vibe had wandered into heavier territory without asking permission. I don’t fully know.

What I do know is I found it strange and a little funny watching white suburban kids who absolutely smoked weed to his music in high school suddenly call him a sellout on the internet, like they’re sitting on a board of cultural authenticity. The Olympics do that to people. They make everyone feel entitled to an opinion.

The Burton event for Snoop felt… fine? Normal. Polite. Snoop came out, photos happened, everyone got their moment, and then he was gone. I’m sure he got paid. Is that selling out? I don’t know. The Olympics are sponsored by beer named after a virus. It’s not exactly a moral high ground.

What stuck with me wasn’t whether Snoop belonged there or not. It was the way the Olympics quietly turn everything they touch into a symbol. You don’t opt into that. It just happens. One minute it’s a rapper at a TV event, the next it’s a conversation about politics, branding, legacy, and whether anyone is allowed to exist without meaning being stapled to them.

That part felt unavoidable. And maybe that was the point.

The Most Famous Man Without Competing: Zeb Powell

The real star of the week was not on a start list.

Zeb Powell was everywhere. Or maybe it just felt that way. We went riding the flow park behind the hotels and it immediately turned into a moving meet-and-greet. Twenty-plus photos and autographs in the span of a few laps. At one point a young Austrian kid walked up, looked at him for a long second, realized who he was looking at, and just started crying. 

It kept happening. Restaurants. Lift lines. Sidewalks. After women’s Big Air, Zeb somehow got us into a completely closed club. Private table. No questions asked. Pat Dodge and I had to text him a selfie like two teenagers trying to convince a bouncer we were on the list. He showed the phone. The rope moved. That was it.

After the Men’s pipe final we stumbled into Mohe, which translates to “mountain heart,” though it feels more like a fever dream assembled by someone who refused to choose between indoors and outdoors. A full wooden cabin built inside a hotel restaurant. Plates clattering. Wine flowing. At some point the kitchen staff emerged, aprons dusted in flour, asking for photos with Zeb like he was a visiting head of state. He smiled. Obliged. Didn’t seem surprised.

That was the thing. None of this surprised him.

The Olympics run on sponsorship dollars and television contracts, sure. They run on schedules, credentials, security perimeters, and graphics packages. But down in the streets, in the bars, on the hill behind the hotels, it runs on something else entirely. Presence. Charisma. Whether or not Zeb Powell is with you.

The Games may not know exactly what to do with someone like Zeb. He doesn’t fit cleanly into the machinery. But the rest of the world figured it out immediately. And watching that happen, in real time, felt like a quiet reminder that not all relevance is awarded. Some of it just shows up, uninvited, and takes over the space.

The Pin Economy:

No one warned me about the pins. Or maybe they did and I dismissed it as Olympic folklore. Either way, I was unprepared.

It starts subtly. A glance at your lanyard. A nod. Someone asking, “You trade?” Riders trading with riders. Media with media. Volunteers hovering. Waiters leaning in between courses. Shop owners on the street holding up lanyards like rare coins. Everyone wants something. Everyone has something. Every interaction carries a faint whiff of negotiation.

Very quickly it becomes clear this is not a souvenir culture. It is a full economy.

Pins are currency. Pins are access. Pins are proof you were here and, more importantly, proof that you mattered enough to be given one. National teams treat them like heirlooms. Media guards them like credentials. Some people have a system. Some people have a spreadsheet in their head. Some people are just hustling.

At first I found it kind of annoying. Another layer. Another thing to manage. Another social tax on top of an event already bloated with meaning and logistics. But by day three it clicked. This is how people ground themselves in something this big. You can’t hold the Olympics in your hands. You can’t make sense of it all at once. But you can trade a pin.

Like most things at the Olympics, it’s absurd. And like most things at the Olympics, it works.

The Eventual Wear and Tear:

By the final days of the trip I no longer know what day it is. Time has flattened into a loop: Pasta, spritz, pizza, helmet on, credential out, Americano, repeat. The Olympics don’t let you check in and out. You don’t watch them and then return to your life. They become your life. Full saturation.

Livigno is basically one long main street, and every walk between obligations feels longer than it should. Somewhere along one of them I run into Halldor Helgason dragging a board bag. Normally that would feel electric. Instead I feel a low-grade fear. Not of Halldor, exactly, but of what he represents. If there were a podium for people most capable of accelerating exhaustion, he’d be on it. He tells me the Beyond Medals crew is inbound. I nod and feel another unit of energy leave my body.

That night there’s a line outside Bivio and I know immediately I don’t have it in me. Loud music. No conversation. Overpriced drinks. Everyone insisting this is the moment. I text Halldor and learn he’s across the street at a nearly empty basement bar doing karaoke. Relief.

Inside, Italians belt out songs I don’t know. Felt hats with feathers everywhere. I sign up for Gin and Juice. The karaoke host has never heard it. No lyrics. Doesn’t matter. I get through it. We sit. We talk shop. Our eyes sag. When the bartender offers free limoncello on the way out, we decline out of self-preservation.

Leaving the Hallucination:

Somewhere between zipping the bag and watching the mountains slide past the train window, it hit me that this was my last chance to sit with what the Olympics had actually meant. Not the idea of them. Not the branding or the mythology. The lived version. The noise, the pressure, the contradictions you only notice once you’ve been inside long enough to stop being impressed by them.

What I came to understand, somewhere between the judging confusion and the karaoke, the powder day and the taped pants, is that the Olympics only matter because everyone agrees, briefly, to believe they do. A mandela effect of sorts.  Parents believe. Nations believe. Sponsors believe. Broadcasters believe. Snowboarders pretend not to, but still show up. It’s a shared hallucination held together by flags, music, cameras, and the promise that this moment means more than the others.

Living inside it doesn’t make that belief stronger or weaker. It just makes it visible. And once you see it that way, the Olympics stop being something you either bow to or reject. They become a temporary weather system. Loud. Confusing. Occasionally beautiful. Then it moves on.

Snowboarding stays.

Contest Coverage

(Or: The Part You Watched on TV)

I should say this up front. None of what follows is meant to diminish the work it took for these riders to get here. Making the Olympics is still an absurd, earned thing. But I didn’t come all this way to rewrite what you already watched on TV, and I’m not interested in a play by play that a hundred slow motion replays have already handled better than I ever could. This whole operation is built for the couch. So what follows is one sentence per contest, how it felt on the ground, and then the podiums. That way the record lives here somewhere, and we can all move on.

Men’s Big Air Finals

An hour long demonstration of how many ways a human can spin 1800 degrees before your eyes ask for a glass of water.

Podium:

1. Kira Kimura

2. Ryoma Kimata

3. Su Yiming

Women’s Big Air Finals

Men’s Big Air left us dizzy, women’s Big Air calmed everyone down, and then Zoi Sadowski-Synnott got a haka, which felt like the correct ending.

Podium:

1. Kokomo Murase

2. Zoi Sadowski-Synnott

3. Yu Seung-eun

Women’s Halfpipe Finals

Women’s halfpipe gave us Chloe Kim not winning, Gaon Choi on top, and Ryan Runke (Gaon’s Agent) crying tears of joy, which about sums it up.

Podium: 

1. Choi Ga-on

2. Chloe Kim

3. Mitsuki Ono 

Men’s Halfpipe Finals

A collective reveal that sometime in the last four years everyone quietly learned a whole new language of tricks, then chose the same night to speak it fluently and occasionally overshoot the pipe doing so.

Podium:

1. Yuto Totsuka

2. Scotty James

3. Ryusei Yamada
   
   

Men’s Slopestyle Finals

A slow realization that the jumps were a formality, the rails were the real currency, and the judging had drifted so far from qualifiers that you started mentally inventorying which judges you’d seen at the bar.

Podium:

1. Su Yiming

2. Taiga Hasegawa

3. Jake Canter 

Women’s Slopestyle Finals

Taped pants, slow jumps, shakier scoring, and the unmistakable sense that the whole production had run past its expiration date.

Podium:

1. Mari Fukada

2. Zoi Sadowski-Synnott 

3. Kokomo Murase