I grew up in Zurich, Switzerland—my parents still live over there—and I started skiing before I can remember, probably when I was one or so. I don’t remember learning how to ski, because it was just something I grew up doing, but I started freestyle skiing when I was about 10.
Both my parents loved to ski—especially my dad; he’s a huge skier. He grew up around Salt Lake City, where we moved when I was 16, and skied his whole life. And I have an older brother who’s a snowboarder, so I’d go out with him. He’d snowboard, I’d ski, and my parents would go off and ski on their own. I was never really part of a team—I always just did it on my own, and I just did all sorts of skiing, especially park skiing, which is similar to the kind of freestyle skiing that I compete in now, which is slopestyle and big-air skiing. Big-air is one big jump where you do your best tricks, and slopestyle is a series of jumps and rail combined into a run, which is the event I won in the last Olympics.
I remember seeing a video of my dad when he was a young teenager doing freestyle tricks on skis before it was an official sport, or in the Olympics, or any of that stuff—and I thought that was really cool. My brother was already doing tricks on a snowboard, so I kind of got inspired by my both dad and my brother, and then I started watching YouTube videos of random people posting their tricks in terrain parks with rails and jumps and sometimes half-pipes. And then my parents got us a trampoline for the backyard, and every day after school I would go and jump on the trampoline and practice doing a bunch of flips. I never really had a coach or anything—me and my friends were just teaching ourselves and watching stuff and learning that way, by trial and error, which was pretty fun.
Lately I’ve been training in Australia and New Zealand, because it’s their winter. I’ll be coming back in October, which is when the Northern Hemisphere season starts off. All of these events are leading up to the Olympics, so I’m just trying to feel in form. The big goal is to feel as comfortable as I can and really progress my skiing for the Olympics in February.
For this shoot, we went all around London and shot at a bunch of different locations. It was crazy hot out, the middle of a heat wave in London, there were a gajillion people around looking at us like we were crazy—but it was super fun.
In this story: hair, Shiori Takahashi; makeup, Thom Walker. Nails, Chisato Yamamoto. Set design: Afra Zamara. Production: January Productions. Digital artwork: Artpost. With thanks to Good Catch.