Torstein Horgmo interview
The Norwegian triple cork pioneer knows the snowboard game is all about hard graft.
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It's early April in the small French resort of Les Houches. A shadowy figure, whose face is concealed by gold iridium goggles and a black doo-rag, is lapping the giant kicker on the sun-baked slopes of the DC Area 43 snow park. On every hit, he shoots up terrifyingly high, throws out a complex spin/flip variation, occasionally utters a frustrated ‘argh’ mid-air and then squirms to land cleanly, before hopping back on his chaffeur-driven snowmobile for another hit.
The man behind the mask is Torstein Horgmo, and this isn't snowboarding for fun: Torstein is in training. “It's getting more and more important to stay in shape for the contests circuit,” he says. “I'm very critical, though. I feel like I can't ever get anything perfect because there isn't any perfect way to do it.”
This desire for perfection has seen the 24-year-old from Trondheim, Norway, leading the progressive charge in snowboarding. In June 2010, he took the snowboarding world by surprise with a video that showed him landing the first-ever triple cork (three backflips each with a 180 rotation) on the Folgefonna glacier in Norway. “Obviously, if you do something stupid, people will want to watch it,” he laughs. “I just wanted to see if it was possible.”
He was 'stupid' again in the 2011 Aspen Winter X Games, where he claimed gold with his new crowd-pleaser. “It was a bad situation, it was not the best jump to try that trick on [but] I wanted it so bad that I tried it anyway,” he says. “I almost knocked myself out the first time and had a migraine. Of course, winning is a big part of it but it's also about progressing myself.”
For all his self-confessed stupidity, Torstein is astute and strategic about his career. By spurning the TTR World Tour in favour of high-profile contests like the Winter X Games and the Dew Tour, he has been able to bank prize money and keep sponsors happy so he can spend more time filming in the backcountry and making short fun videos for his website. “One of my goals from the beginning was to make it to a point where I could snowboard for free wherever I wanted,” says Torstein. “Now the motivation is to make it so that I don't have to work after I'm done snowboarding!”
From that point of view, all the training seems to make perfect sense. It does have its downsides, though. Says Torstein: “I can't sit on my ass and play Xbox all day anymore, even though I would really like to.”
Look out for a new documentary on Torstein Horgmo coming later in the year.
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Torstein Horgmo interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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