Words: Tom Kelly 2023-01-23 10:24:26
“After seven hours shoveling a jump at Timberline, OR, Joss Christensen found the patience to shoot a few portraits at the Silcox Hut. The next day we had a killer jump session with Joss, Quinn Wolferman and Andrew “Hot Laps’ Gayda.” Photo: Andrew Napier State Highway 13 is a lonely country road, coursing along the Rio Blanco in western Colorado. Pickup trucks full of ranchers and natural gas field workers are usually the only traffic, but every January, Utah professional skiers like Joss Christensen traverse the empty thruway en route to X Games in Aspen, CO. That’s exactly where Christensen found himself in January 2014, piloting his Subaru through a snowy morning, out of cell range as thoughts bounced through his head. Despite winning the final Olympic selection event a week earlier in his hometown of Park City, UT, it wasn’t enough to punch a ticket to the freeskiing debut in Sochi. The solitude was playing mind games with him. Would team USA get a fourth spot on its new Olympic freeskiing team? If it did, what were his chances against his childhood buddies Alex Schlopy and McRae Williams, or Utah transplant (and Olympic favorite) Tom Wallisch? His good friend Gus Kenworthy, who along with Bobby Brown and Nick Goepper had already clinched spots, had texted him earlier that morning, “Hey, I think you got this.” Kenworthy was in the car ahead, the caravan leapfrogging their way toward the Rockies. Christensen’s phone came alive as he hit a narrow band of coverage. It was U.S. Freeskiing Head Coach Skogen Sprang. “You better pull off the road for a minute,” Sprang said. This can’t be good, Christensen thought. But through the static of the call, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, he got the news that would change everything: Christensen had indeed punched his ticket to the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. Collecting his thoughts while on the side of the road, he called his mom. The normally calm and cool Christensen jumped up and down in the cold afternoon air, beaming as he shared the news. After the death of his father to heart disease just five months earlier, Christensen knew the Olympic nod was a new start, but he had no idea the heights it would take him to next. It’s been nine years since Christensen’s storybook finish at the inaugural Olympic ski slopestyle event, where he won gold on a warm day in Rosa Khutor. Christensen, then just 22, stood between Kenworthy and Goepper on the podium. He was the quiet one with wavy-curly hair, a virtual stranger to international media. On a snowy day this past November, a 30-year-old Christensen sat in a Park City coffee shop as big clumps of powder dumped from the heavens. He had been on a whirlwind ride all summer and fall, coaching in Whistler, skiing in New Zealand, then jetting to a wedding in Vermont. He had stopped at home to change bags, planning to rocket off to Innsbruck, Austria, and settle into an apartment he and friends had rented to ski the Tirol this winter. For now, he was reflecting on how a gritty park rat is still an integral part of the sport after nearly two decades spent chasing a career on snow. Skiing has always been a guiding force for Christensen. He and older brother Charlie had a ski-centric upbringing in Park City, born to ski-bum parents. His father, J.D., and mother, Debbie, both moved to town in the ’70s, and met at the fondue restaurant where they worked. “They got me into skiing really, really young,” Christensen says. “I didn’t enjoy it too much because I always hurt myself jumping off things and I would eat it pretty hard. I remember breaking a lot of goggle lenses.” As a kid, he skied with Schlopy, Williams and Jossi and Byron Wells. He looked up to the legendary Tanner Hall, eight years his elder, poring through Freeze magazines and such films as Ski Movie III, Happy Dayz and Session 1242. He connected with Utah freestyle coach Kerry Miller as a middle schooler, competing in the U.S. Open at 13 years old and breaking through at 16 with a second-place finish behind Brown in slopestyle at the 2008 Big Bear Open. Sponsors started to call and what began as a childhood dream suddenly seemed viable. “It gave my parents a bit more motivation,” says Christensen, who wanted to pull his financial weight after the investment his mom and dad had made, squeezing their blue-collar salaries to fund his gear and travel. The next few years were marked by steady progress for Christensen, from the Dumont Cup to the Dew Tour to the X Games. Still, with the Olympics looming, his name was rarely mentioned in the conversation about the nation’s top spots. The Olympic season has been a lonely and stressful time for Christensen. J.D. was sick, but Christensen needed to be at the Olympic-qualifying events in New Zealand. He flew there, only to return a few days later when his father passed. It was a trying time and when his results started to slip, he felt like he was losing everything all at once. The team selection process for freeskiing’s Olympic debut was new to everyone, and was spread out over five events at Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Park City. There would be three, maybe four, spots on Team USA. But there were arguably seven men who were legitimate contenders for a U.S. gold medal—and all of them were friends. Christensen knew something would have to give, but the thought of straining friendships when he needed them most added more stress in the start gate. “Joss did not really enjoy the competition process,” says Mike Jaquet, founder of Freeze Magazine and the U.S. Freeskiing Open. “There was so much pressure, you were competing against friends, tough conditions—it was physically and emotionally demanding.” Competitive slopestyle in 2014 was the domain of triple corks—three flips combined with three or more full body rotations. Those who had them won medals, those who didn’t collected points, but rarely podiums. Christensen, a stylish tactician, was still playing catch-up by the time Sochi rolled around. But that all got flipped on its head during a sunny morning practice run in Russia. Sprang remembers Christensen lacing his first right triple 1260 and knowing the whole game had just changed. “Joss knew that’s what he needed to do well,” Sprang says. Christenson also had an unexpected boost waiting for him at the bottom. After that first practice, Debbie surprised her son in the finish area. As a Park City travel agent, she had the forethought to obtain a travel visa “just in case,” but the cost of a plane ticket to Russia was staggering. Unbeknownst to her, friends and clients had rallied when Joss made the team, secretly footing the bill. Nancy Logan, whose daughter Devin Logan was also competing on the team, offered her a bed. Bolstered by a new trick and family support in the finish corral, Christenson kicked off qualifying with a five-point lead over the field. In the two-run medals round, he threw down a 95.80 and made history, securing the first-ever slopestyle Olympic gold in men’s freeskiing. “I felt so far down the list of skiers at the time and it was a pipe dream just to go,” he says. “But the coolest part for me the next couple of years was the confidence [the gold medal] gave me.” Christensen’s win came with the requisite visits to The Today Show and late-night appearances in New York City. He soaked it in, but always had his eyes set beyond the bright lights. Long before he made the Sochi team, he knew he wanted to spend his life in the sport. With an Olympic gold in his possession, he didn’t see pressure to perform—he saw an opportunity to make the his dream a reality. After Sochi, Christenson won X Games silver in 2015. But a checklist of injuries—a broken hand and wrist, torn knee ligaments, a separated collarbone—hampered his quest to return to the U.S. Team for the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang. Most of all, it was the knee that just never healed through five surgeries. As in 2014, the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic selection came down to the wire. This time, Christensen didn’t get the call. Eighteen months later, he opted to move away from contests. He was just 27, but a whole new generation was coming into the sport. He saw that. And he saw his own role outside of contests. Indeed, Christensen never viewed athletic success as a stand-alone goal. To him, it was more about growing the sport by fostering that next generation, something that came in the shape of a platform, rather than a podium. Long before the 2014 Olympics, the idea of head-to-head park skiing had been percolating between Christensen and fellow skier Matt Walker, with the pair waiting for the right moment to bring it to fruition. “We just kind of wanted a different avenue to help push and build freeskiing,” Christensen says. “[A way] to maybe help kids who didn’t have funding or access to big parks and training.” Their answer was SLVSH, a bracket-style tournament patterned after the traditional basketball game HORSE, in which players go toe-to-toe with others matching basketball shot for basketball shot, picking up a letter each time they can’t match their opponent’s bucket. Replicating the format for skiing unleashed a new wave of technical tricks and variations, but more importantly brought skiers together across multiple disciplines and levels. “The main basis of SLVSH was to create our own competition series that’s cheap to run, fun and that can involve any skiers, whether they’re only good at skiing rails to X Games and World Cup level skiers,” Christensen says. With a skeleton crew filming the matchups, SLVSH was able to stack months’ worth of content, releasing edits strategically to give it a tournament feel. The first event took place in the fall of 2015 in Perisher, Australia, and the platform has gained serious momentum since. Its flagship event has become a 16-skier bracket at Grandvalira, Andorra, and the tournaments generate tens of millions of online views, opening up a whole new world for young freeski athletes who compete, like Evan McEachran, Colby Stevenson and Finn Bilous. “The success of SLVSH stems from Joss being very relatable to the majority of kids,” Jaquet says. “Joss is the park-rat kid out there in [Park City’s] Pick ‘n Shovel [terrain park] bell to bell. That’s very relatable. He wasn’t so much a ski star—he was a kid who was always making it work and having enough means to get from one place to the next to keep the dream alive.” “I truly believe that SLVSH is the raddest thing happening in freeskiing right now,” says James Woods, British skier and 2019 FIS slopestyle world champion. “The creative, alternative approach to what we love is incredibly welcome and has been since the conception. The SLVSH cups have blown the minds of everyone in our world and have reached a considerable amount of action sports enthusiasts beyond just skiing.” In past iterations, the tournament has awarded prize money to its top contenders and has featured title sponsors such as Völkl and Monster Energy. Restarting its engines after a few years of COVID delays, SLVSH doesn’t have its details dialed for this season just yet, but Christensen says they could host up to three events this year—one in Austria, possibily another in Park City and the finale in Andorra. For the U.S. event, he hopes to do an all-women’s bracket for the first time. In many ways his personal mission isn’t just surviving, it has staying power. “It’s not about who does the most spins all the time,” Wallisch says. “The longevity that Joss has seen comes down to his personality and his ability to be friends with everybody first, then a competitor and skier second.” Nearly a decade after his Olympic gold, Christensen remains a quiet influencer in the freeski world. When he’s not organizing events, Christensen films with Park City friend and filmer Andrew Napier, laying down edits for sponsors such as K2, Smith and Rockstar Energy, and rolling out exclusive content like 2022’s “Simple Math” on the SLVSH website. He’s even helping K2 with new ski and boot design, and says the experience has given him a behind-the-scenes view of the gear he pushes in the park and pipe. In addition to his longtime buddy Woods, Christensen has surrounded himself with a world-class crew of skiers. Canadian X Games champion Vincent Gagnier, as well as young gun Norwegian Olympian Ferdinand Dahl, and Montana native and 2022 X Games knuck huck champion Quinn Wolferman, are all part of his on-hill entourage. “It’s been fun to have some younger kids in my ski group to keep me energized and up to date,” Christensen says. In many ways, the age range of his ski crew is a testament to his staying power in freeskiing’s inner circle. Christensen keeps his Olympic gold and X Games silver in an old beanie from the now-defunct Utah film company 4bi9. In characteristic fashion, he says, “I don’t look at it too often these days, but I’ll break it out to show family and friends when they ask.” He knows the medals are what have given him the opportunity to build a life in skiing, but hopes what he’s helped build since 2014 will outlast his 15 minutes of fame. For Christensen, it’s all about keeping momentum rolling through filming, his work with SLVSH and lifting the next generation with him as he climbs. “In my mind, I don’t want to do anything else,” he says. “So I’ve got to make sure I can be relevant, help out and have a place in the industry—even if I’m not the best skier. I still want to have my foot in the industry. I want to be a part of it.”
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