Nico Porteous Pipe Dreams.
The olympic champ on breaking the halfpipe mold.
Words Nico Porteous | Images Noah Wallace
Halfpipe for me, up until February 2022, was all about competition and trying to win.
Finding a formula that worked with the judges and sticking to it. Building a run that would win. That was the goal. After years of chasing this goal, it worked and the results started to come. This period of my life was insane, competition to competition, with many podium results. It was the perfect storm.
Three weeks after the Beijing Olympics, this all came crashing down when I tore my ACL.
At the time, I was gutted, but like all the athletes before me, I soon came to accept what had happened and got on with the year of rehab. Rehab was a positive experience. It gave me the opportunity to snap out of the competitive routine that I had been in for my whole career and branch out and see another aspect of skiing — filming.
With filming there are no podiums to chase, no formulas to create a winning run; it’s just you expressing yourself and having a good time doing it… that’s it. In a way, this was an epiphany for me; it allowed me to get back to my roots of why I started skiing, and that is to express myself and enjoy it, which over time had been overshadowed by the motivation of podiums.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with chasing podiums. That feeling of winning can be very fulfilling and brings an immense sense of achievement, but that season of filming made me realize that you can achieve that feeling without wearing a competition bib.
Whenever I was training halfpipe, I would always take a few laps at the start or end of the day just jibbing the walls, trying little tricks on the coping, doing hand plants, and sometimes carving up the same wall to hit it twice. This was always the best part of the training day. It was never done with any intention of trying to do it in a competition run.
That was until March 2023, when it was time to get back into pipe training when I randomly came up with the idea…
Why not completely change the way I ski pipe?
I think it came down to being nervous about returning to the same pattern that I was in from 2014-2022.
I planned this new run that involved a zero spin, alternative drop in and the biggest change, the same wall carve back airs.
All of this was inspired by wanting to make halfpipe fun and exciting for me again. I had been forced to sit out the entire competitive year, I was a year older and a “different” person to the one pre-injury. I realised that if I was going to continue to ski pipe, I needed to make changes in how I approached it. I knew I wasn’t going to be happy doing what I had been doing for the last 8 years for another 4.
I think this run and my new outlook on pipe skiing is a pure form of self-expression on skis.
For me it’s not really about the results anymore it’s more showing people how I interpret the pipe. And hopefully while doing that I’ll encourage people to go and try for themselves. In previous years the halfpipe event was the event that drew the biggest crowds but as the spin index increased the viewing numbers decreased.
The increased technicality of the tricks also drove a need for better built pipes which were more of an investment for resorts to acquire the latest pipe cutting technology. Which saw many resorts deciding that the cost far outweighed the return, and I think halfpipes were often looked at as a place just for “National team training” or “only for big tricks”.
By adopting a totally different style of skiing halfpipe, I want to try and inspire the general skiing community back into the U shaped ditches and to have fun while they are still available.
