I would say snowboarding definitely ranks
as one of the top, if not the top,
most dangerous Winter Olympic sport.
I’ve done my discs, I broke my back from hitting the deck.
I snapped my femur in half, broken and displaced hip.
I’ve got a rod and four screws in there.
Next year, smacked my wrists on the deck, broke my scaphoid.
Bone graft from my hip into my wrist,
everything taken out of my leg.
Separated shoulder, meniscus,
blew my disc almost all the way in half on my L5,
tear in my L4, bulge in my L5, and I broke my back.
I had a compression fracture up high in my back,
got a hematoma anyway.
That’s why you should see me wake up in the morning, bro.
Slams are very common.
It’s all part of the game.
The halfpipe is definitely dangerous.
The walls are 22 feet, it’s pretty much sheet ice,
it’s about as hard as cement.
So, if you go down, it hurts.
The margin for error is quite high,
a centimeter or an inch
can either put you where you don’t want to be,
or it can put you where you do want to be.
The lip of the pipe, that's one thing you don’t want to hit.
When you’re 15 feet above the deck,
it takes a lot of precision
to get back in to exactly where you want to land.
It’s the same as being in a car,
if you’re going to crash a car
at 20 miles per hour or crash a car at 100 miles per hour,
that goes hand-in-hand with snowboarding.
If you’re going faster, you’re taking more risk,
you’re putting your life on the line,
you’re riding on the edge.
You can always land on your head,
you hit the corner of the halfpipe,
which we call the coping, bouncing in.
So, you get a two-for-one, you get the slam on the coping,
then you get the secondary bounce.
There are just so many things you have to be on top of.
There isn’t a moment where I’m going up there
thinking it’s going to be a breeze
or I'm not going to be doing
something that isn’t going to scare me, so...
It keeps me alive, keeps me on my toes, and I love it.
I think a little bit of fear is inevitable.
I don’t think anybody could ride halfpipe for a living
and not be scared ever.
It’s really scary,
but that’s part of what makes it so exciting and fun.
Everyone has fear.
If someone tells you he doesn’t have fear, it’s wrong.
When I'm in a contest,
I think the burning adrenaline makes any fear disappear
as I dive head-on into the first jump.
You’re your own worst enemy.
You’ve got to let yourself just
go out there and compete and ride at your best.
If you overthink it, that’s where you get in trouble.
So, for me, I’ve been pro
since I was 13, competing since I was 7,
this is just what feels right to me.
When we’re at the top of the pipe,
having that concentration really goes a long way.
Even if you are scared, if you have fear,
you’re nervous, it’s OK to have those emotions,
but it’s just accepting that they’re going
to be there with you for the ride.
And once you can accept that, it’s game mode.
I do a lot of visualization for overcoming my fear.
Maybe tossing in the airbag, maybe going straight to snow,
but overcoming the fear is probably
one of the best feelings you can ever feel.
So, it’s all worth it in the end.
You have to tame fear and learn how to deal with it.
Once you learn that, it’s the greatest power of all time.
It’s what keeps us all alive and keeps life exciting.
Without fear, life is not exciting.
Bouncing back from a crash, I’m always very honest with myself
about what did go wrong and why it happened.
Just learning from it and moving forward,
not becoming a victim.
For me, with anything in life,
if you don't go big then there's very little point.
You can only think about your moves
and your style after you jump
so that's probably why I think that way.
Go big or go home.
It’s about the journey, so I’d rather be sore
and broken when I’m older and have to deal with it
and be able to have the experience
and tell the stories, than be 100% at 70 years old
and not really have lived the one life that I have.