German snowboarder Andre Höflich.Photo / Stomping Grounds Projects via The New York Times
For snowboarders and freestyle skiers, winning often means doing what no one else can do, or dares to try.
One more spin. One more flip. Add a twist, a grab, some extra flair. Now try the same trick, but backward. Maybe that's enough to reach the podium.
For a certain segment of the most extreme Olympic sports, there is no limit to the imagination. Snowboarders and freestyle skiers generally can fly as high as they want. They can try any trick they think they can perform.
In many other events — like ski jumping, cross-country skiing or bobsledding — success comes with redundancy and finding efficiency in repetitive motion. What they do at this year's Winter Olympics will look a lot like what athletes did long ago.
Not in the halfpipe, the slopestyle courses, the aerial ramps. Not where winning means doing tricks that no one else can do. Or wants to do.
That is what André Höflich, a 24-year-old halfpipe snowboarder from Germany, is dealing with now, trying to dial in the hardest trick of his life in time for the Olympics. Höflich spent the winter working on a routine of tricks that would impress the judges in Beijing.
How to do that is a difficult, personal calculation. He must push his limits, past his comfort zone, riding the thin edge between danger and evolution.
"I'm not scared of injuries or surgeries, because I am used to those things," Höflich said in October in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he was training. "But if I could not snowboard anymore, that would break my heart."
Like all others near the top of his sport, Höflich faces a persistent Catch-22. To keep up means to try things that are more likely to cause injuries; getting injured means not being able to keep up, or maybe not compete at all.
"This is the only thing I want to do, and I want to do it as long as possible," Höflich said. "But I also have to push myself all the time to be able to do this longer. At the same time, pushing myself to the limits, it's getting more dangerous for me. The possibility of losing everything comes closer and closer and closer the more I push my limits."
The best athletes, like Höflich, spend their training time trying to piece together new and inventive sequences to unveil during competitions.
It is called "progression." The tricks get higher, bigger, twistier — more dangerous. Performances that won medals at past Olympics might not even qualify this time. Time weeds out those who do not evolve.
Shaun White is 35 now, heading to his fifth Olympics. He is doing tricks more difficult and dangerous than he performed when he won gold medals in 2006, 2010 and 2018. It is a cruel trick of reverse-ageing — getting better while getting older.
"There's so many situations where I'm like, 'No, I'm not feeling it,'" White said of working on new tricks. "It's too windy. I'm a little tired. I'm a little jet-lagged. I'm a little something. Or my head's just somewhere else. Or the conditions aren't perfect. It's just kind of your gut feeling. And I usually listen to it. As one of the oldest competitors now, part of my career being this long has to be because — I know it's because — the amount of times I walk away."
Consequences of progression can be severe, even deadly. The 6.7 metre-deep halfpipe is especially dangerous, with its rock-hard walls and unforgiving horizontal deck. Canada's Sarah Burke died after a training crash in the halfpipe in 2012. Most top snowboarders and freeskiers have been seriously hurt.
They know the risk. But they push on. Procrastination is easy when it is the offseason or there is a string of training days ahead. But when the window starts to close, or a big event like the Olympics looms, anxiety and fear rise.
"A lot of times you can get stuck in that — maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow," said snowboarder Red Gerard, who arrived in Beijing looking to defend his Olympic gold medal in slopestyle but finished just shy of the podium in fourth place. "You get up on the mountain, you start small and work your way up, work your way up. And eventually you just get to the point where you're like, 'OK, I've done as much as I can to prepare myself for this trick.' The more you think about it at that point, the worse it's going to get. You've just got to do it."
Höflich has voices in his head. One belongs to his coach, like a psychologist, reading Höflich's mind and mannerisms. Others belong to friendly competitors, encouraging him with positive vibes.
But the biggest voice in his head is his own. Each day, each run, Höflich wonders if now is the right time to make the next big move.
"The negative me tells me that I can't do it," Höflich said. "The positive me tells me you can do it."
Proving the "negative me" wrong, he said, is the key. "Saying yes, I can do it, don't talk to me like this," Höflich said.
At the Swiss training camp, on a glacier, Höflich was one of dozens of top riders preparing for the season. The trick he wanted to add to his arsenal was a "cab double cork 1260" — taking off backward (his usual lead foot in back), rotating 3 1/2 times with two flips and landing backward again.
"There are three other people who can actually do it," he said. "And then there would be me."
Part of the training is to commit the trick to muscle memory. First, Höflich practised it on the relative safety of a trampoline. Then he brought it to a slopeside air bag, assured of a soft landing.
Then came the hard part: trying it in the halfpipe, a 6.7metre-deep chute of ice, where the trick would send him more than 6 metres over the 90-degree edge. It is a place that does not forgive mistakes easily.
"If it doesn't scare me," he said of any new move, "I'm not on the limit."
The thought of landing on his head haunted him.
Again, then again, and again. He kept trying.
Through weeks of training, Höflich came close to landing the trick. He got the combination of spins and flips and landed on his feet — enough to tell him that it was possible. But he could not complete it cleanly, without touching a hand to the snow or wobbling off-balance.
"Try to try, fear disappears — never fully, but a little bit," Höflich said. "I didn't die, so why not do it again? And again and again and again?"
Ultimately, he hoped, the manoeuvre would be part of a five-trick routine down the halfpipe at the Olympics. It all must flow smoothly. The trick needed to be close to perfect, nearly every time. Time was running short. The Olympics were coming.
"If I land a trick nine times out of 10 tries, then I can say, 'Yes, this is definitely contest ready,' and I can put it into my run," he said. "If it's just six out of 10, I can't. I can't tell myself that this is my trick. Because it's not. I'm still learning it."
As the winter's competition season began, Höflich performed his routine without his new trick. He was still good enough to earn third place, landing on the podium, at a major event in January.
But he knew he had to get better if he wanted to earn a medal in Beijing. The level of competition was rising around him. The Olympics were coming fast.
Höflich went back to work on the trick.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: John Branch
Photographs by: Emily Rhyne and Noah Throop
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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