Revelstoke, British Columbia—It was the night before finals, and bets were being placed at the bar. $40 buy-in and send the bookie your podium picks.
We had all been gathering at the Rockford bar and grill—The Rock, as it’s known—throughout the week. The Rock became the unofficial headquarters of Natural Selection. A makeshift media hub, the way its seats were constantly filled with photogs, writers, PR people, not to mention agents, athletes, and NST staff.
Mike Yoshida compared The Rock—one morning while we were sitting at the bar having breakfast and coffee—to a cruise ship, the way you see the same people over and over again, eating the same meals while interacting with the same staff. Such is life in a resort town.
It was over beers at The Rock one night in the interim period between qualifiers and finals days, sitting in a booth with Harrison Gordon, that he mentioned to me how NST made him finally feel like a sports fan, like watching these riders chart their course through Montana Bowl—the venue—left him feeling the way a baseball fan would were they to watch their favorite team in the World Series. I understood that. I’m not much of a sports fan. I usually get confused, bored, and eager for the commercials to come on. But being at NST was working for me. First, it was the scale of the whole thing. It was grand in a way I had never expected. Stepping out of the snow cat as I arrived at the venue for the first day of the contest, I was taken aback by how much I had underestimated Montana Bowl’s presence. It’s one thing to watch NST on television, watching the riders and pointing at the screen like some Monday morning quarterback, saying to yourself, “I could do that.” But if you see it in person, you truly understand, you cannot. There’s nothing that can prepare you for the enormity, the steepness, the overwhelming aura that the face of the mountain exudes. When I stepped out of the cat, I simply set my eyes on the monster that lay before me, and giggled at the absurdity of its presence. It was all I could do.
There was another aspect of the event that I grew to appreciate while watching the riders take their qualifying runs: the talent.
I know, it seems obvious that the riders would be talented, but it goes further than that. Take the Olympics, for example. There’s overlap between the two events, sure, both in physicality and with a few of the riders themselves. But, seeing the course at Natural Selection, it’s clear that the Olympics are not an accurate test of how well a person can truly ride their snowboard. Slopestyle, at the Olympics or anywhere else for that matter, is riding from feature to feature. Montana Bowl is, in itself, the feature. Riding the NST course may involve a person hitting a jump and a cliff, but the ride between those two can be just as challenging. There is no moment during NST in which a rider can drop their guard, lest they dip their nose too low and tomahawk before they’ve had a chance to descend that final pillow line. The brains involved in succeeding at Natural Selection are just as important as the guts.
It was the night before finals, and the bar was packed. Most of the finals day athletes were home—though rumor has it Brin Alexander survived until last call before strapping in for his quarterfinals bout against Mark McMorris in the morning (Stan would later joke on the mic that the matchup between the two was, “Canada’s Problem Child v. its Golden Child”).
The bar, instead, held those boarders who hadn’t made the cut, along with everyone else. I sat with Luke Lund and Miles Fallon, stewing over which picks to place in our brackets. Maybe it was the beer, along with a few jaeger-cesars and some whisky, but all the names—at least for the men—blurred together. There was no one person I saw being able to pull ahead. Or rather, I saw them all pulling ahead. Each competitor had a path to victory if they could stay on their feet. So, for the men, I went with personal preference: BMO for the win.
As for the women, let me first clarify my Olympic comment. While the Olympics may not be the best barometer for someone’s overall ability on a board, many Olympic riders are damn good on their feet. And when that rider is the most decorated Olympic snowboarder of all time, you’d be a fool to bet against her.
The strategy for qualifiers is different from the approach to finals. Qualifiers are about advancing, living to fight another day. Finals are about going for broke, leaving it all out on the table, and seizing the chance at glory. And these finals certainly stuck to that script. The men dropped first, and Nils plowed like a switch god down the course, fending off the big air we’ve come to expect from Jare. Torstein, keeping with the divine theme, descended from the heavens, opening a new line to the collective awe of the crowd, besting Matteo Massitti in the first round. We were two bouts in, and my bracket was still proving successful. Though I suppose it’s time we talked about Brin again.
Seemingly unfazed by his alleged night at the bar, Brin’s confidence excited the snowboard fan in me, but worried the gambler. He was dropping in against Mark McMorris, and yes, both men are talented beyond grasp, just in different ways. Brin is looser. Mark is more methodical. I had wanted to bet in favor of Brin, though I knew he had, at times, blown up in spectacular fashion (e.g., a massive backflip to flat in qualifiers). Brin was a risk, one I’d wanted to take but ultimately avoided by putting Mark in the third-place spot on my bracket. And if there are any aspiring sports betters out there, I hope you take one thing from this article: Listen to your gut.
Brin put on a show, besting Mark, squashing any chance my degenerate ass had of a decent payday. I couldn’t be too mad, though, seeing as BMO’s advancement over Gigi would place two of my favorite backcountry boarders against each other in the semis.
I had been relegated down to a fan, a happy one, but a fan nonetheless.
Since there were more men than women competing, the women all bypassed the quarterfinal, finding themselves matched up in the semis: Maddison Blackley versus Sarka Pancochova on one side of the bracket, and Billy Pelchat versus Zoi Sadowski-Synnott on the other.
Sarka and Maddison are both seasoned competitors, and it showed in their riding. Ultimately, though, it was Sarka who was able to put it down cleaner, starting her run with a textbook back seven and handling everything from then on with the utmost authority.
NST rookie Billy Pelchat held her own in a valiant—but ultimately unsuccessful—bout against the former NST champ Zoi Sadowski-Synnott. It was a pleasure to watch, especially after her hard-charging debut on day one. Billy was no longer unknown to the masses. We saw what she could do, and we were all there for it.
Zoi, though, was simply too good. She commanded the course like a seasoned captain taking a ship through familiar waters. It was nothing to her, a stroll down the mountain. She rode fast, with the sort of enviable swagger only true masters possess, earning herself a spot in the finals, keeping my women’s bracket alive along the way.
For the men, the semi-finals were playing out like a call and response. If Torstein puts up his best run of the day, then Nils has to take his switch. If Brin jibs the starting hut on his way into the course, then BMO has to chuck himself into the abyss. For Nils and Brin, it paid off—though one can argue it paid off for everybody, considering Torstein still scored a 90 and, as for BMO, he sent himself out of the contest in a blaze of glory, tossing a crippler off a side hit in an explosion that sent the crowd screaming. Maybe Brin was starting to rub off on him.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how things played out from here. You know the matchups: Nils and Brin, Zoi and Sarka. I know you were glued to the screen like I was glued to the mountain of snow that stood before me. If the sports analogy from earlier holds, and your favorite team was, in fact, in the World Series, you wouldn’t be waiting for some long-form magazine article days later to see who had one. You’d know that by now. I’m sure you saw Nils follow BMO’s line and send a method to the moon of the sharkfin-style hit. I’m sure you saw Zoi lay out that backflip, taking both of them to the top of the podium. I know you watched the finals and screamed at your television the way I screamed into the frigid winter air with the rest of the spectators. I’m sure you understand that this level of riding, the scale of the whole thing, is indescribable in words, but I know you were watching.
They say this new era of sports betting we’re in is, in part, creating a new incentive structure, something for the fans to hold onto during every second of the game. And maybe that’s true for the people who need it, for the ones who wouldn’t be watching if there weren’t something on the line. But snowboarding isn’t really made up of people like that. So, as the athletes took to the makeshift podium at the bottom of the course, champagne in hand, I couldn’t care less that most of my bracket was fucked. I got to watch something grand, something impressive. That was good enough for me.
