New Zealand Olympians rate as medal chances at X-Games

Nico Porteous returns to the X-Games with a new trick up his sleeve. Photo / Photosport

Olympic free ski halfpipe bronze medallist Nico Porteous returns to competition for the first time in almost a year this weekend in the biggest competition outside the Winter Olympics.

The 19-year-old is a medal contender among a four-strong New Zealand team at the X-Games in Aspen in Colorado.

Joining him is fellow PyeongChang bronze medallist Zoi Sadowski-Synott, Beau James Wells, who was fourth at the Olympics competing with Porteous in the free ski SuperPipe, while Jossi Wells has come out of retirement to line up in a new non-Olympic event, the Knuckle huck.

For Porteous, it could be the only event he competes in this season with most of the other events on the calendar cancelled due to Covid-19.

It's been a different build-up than usual for the young Kiwi whose goal is Olympic gold in Beijing in 2022.

"We would usually have been overseas from November and training prior to the competitive season but this year it's been different - we left on the 7th of January and have come to the States and have been stationed in Copper Mountain for two weeks training pre– X-Games," Porteous explained.

It's during that training camp his rivals really took notice of Porteous who developed a new trick during the New Zealand winter at Cardrona. Already a master of the left double 16, three and a half rotations and two flips, Porteous explains he's added an even more difficult trick to his arsenal.

"I also achieved the right double 16 in September down in New Zealand and I kind of kept it under wraps and didn't post it on social media and then last week at Copper I did it for the first time in front of all my competitors." Porteous said. "It was really good to be able to do another it in another half pipe and I had prepared well and let it rip. It's really nice feeling to know that I now can do this trick."

Despite not travelling overseas to compete for 11 months, Porteous managed to ski for five months in New Zealand thanks to the support of High Performance Sport NZ and Cardrona.

"They allowed us to maximize training opportunities given the circumstances so we were actually skiing a five-month season from the middle of June until the middle of November so we had world-class training facilities, the best in the world and really gave us the opportunity to train as much as we could and progress and learn new tricks and skills ready for the season ahead."

The X-Games field features the crème de la crème of halfpipe free skiers with his rivals including double Olympic champion David Wise, defending champion Alex Ferreira and Porteous's fellow Kiwi Beau-James Wells.

"The X-Games is a massive event for us in free skiing and for the whole action sports industry as it has so much history behind it and so many outstanding performances. I haven't competed since last February so it will be nice to be at the start gate and especially at this prestigious event." Porteous said.

The format for the free ski SuperPipe is a 40-minute jam session where skiers get as many runs in as possible and the best run counts.

"We are a judged sport so anything can happen on the night and it depends on how the judges are judging that night but the feeling you get when you land a run as is not so much 'oh my goodness, I'm going to get a good score, I'm going to win', it's 'wow I've just skied to my best ability and that's all I can do until I see the score'." Porteous explained.

Porteous event is timed to go at 4.30pm on Saturday. Sadowski-Synott gets the New Zealand campaign underway at 8am competing in the snowboard slopestyle where she finished second at last week's World Cup event in Switzerland.

Sadowski-Synott has the Big Air on Sunday morning coming off her first World Cup win in the discipline in Austria earlier this month.

Jossi Wells completes New Zealand's X-Games program in the Knuckle Huck on Monday morning.