Marco Grilc interview
HUCK: How are you feeling about this competition?
Marco Grilc: I’m pretty stoked. The slopestyle is really fun. It's a little bit hard to get the speed but the jump’s a good size and the shape is pretty nice so it should be cool.
You won the Billabong Air & Style in Innsbruck last month. Do you feel there's now more pressure on you?
Yeah, for sure. People are like telling me that I should win. Well, they expect for me to do good. But for me, the fact that I already won the that is pretty sick anyway. I don’t really put pressure on myself though, I just try to ride and have fun.
Were you surprised when you won? Had you been training more for it?
I’d been riding a lot and I knew I could do some pretty cool tricks but I was never expecting to win, you know. I was so stoked just to be there and ride so when I won I was just speechless. I couldn’t really believe it.
How has the news about Kevin Pearce being seriously injured made you feel about competing?
Well, that’s what it is right now. Snowboarding has reached the level where the line between stomping a good trick or slamming and getting injured is pretty thin. It’s definitely something we all need to consider, you know. Once we pass a certain level, that's what it’s going to be like. What happened with Kevin was really tragic and definitely made me think a lot about the direction the sport is going in.
You’re pretty much top of the game at the moment, are you having to take your health pretty seriously because of that?
I think that now I'm little bit older, I try to do more things for my body, just to keep fit. But I think everybody’s got to get in shape, you know, otherwise you’ll just get injured all the time.
The competition is becoming so young nowadays, a lot of people talk of big companies pushing kids too hard and it can end their career too soon. How do you feel about that?
The big part of being a pro snowboarder is that you need to always judge for yourself about what you are capable of. It doesn't really matter what companies are doing or what people around you are doing, you need to always figure it out by yourself.
Watch Marco Grilc compete in the finals of the O'Neill Evolution live via Freecaster from January 8 - 9.
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