Words: Colin Wiseman and Jake Price 2017-10-30 16:50:49
Fun runs are just what Wolle needs. He’s barely ridden for the past year. He dislocated his wrist in December of 2015 while riding one of his home-baked Äsmo snow surfers. What seemed like a simple injury became complicated. After years of abuse from skateboarding, his ligaments were shot. He needed multiple surgeries. They cut bones and fused them back together. There were re-injuries. Too much downtime. For Wolle, it was like putting bad gas in his car. He wanted to go faster, but his body just wouldn’t let him. His time at Island Lake is like a dose of jet fuel.
At 39 years old, Wolle’s been progressing for two decades. Over the years he’s cultivated a clear vision about what he wants to ride, with whom he wants to ride, and how he wants to approach new terrain. But he manages to keep it fresh. Exploring both his physical and mental boundaries is part of Wolle’s personality. He enjoys being off the grid in an RV somewhere, tripping out on the mountains. There’s a whole other side to him, too—the side that is scientific and calculated, the side that works with CNC machines and snowboard presses and AutoCAD programs. He’s not afraid of failure, and knows growth only comes through experimentation.
—Scott Sullivan
Wolle was shaped by his childhood home of Mayrhofen, a town of 5,000-ish folks in Austria’s Zillertal Valley. An hour from Innsbruck, Mayrhofen is a classic Tyrolean Village made up of old-world farmers and alpine enthusiasts. He still lives there with his wife, Stefanie, and their young children Mila, Nicolas and Louie.
When Wolle was 5 years old, his dad relocated the family from Salzburg to Mayrhofen to work on hydroelectric dams in the area. With 10 ski resorts and plenty of summer-access glaciers in the valley, Wolle’s childhood was built around year-round outdoor recreation. It would have been easy for Wolle to follow Austrian tradition and ski. He did, in fact, start skiing at age three with his father and grandfather, but switched to snowboarding in 1992 at age 15. As he explains, “In Austria, there is government funding for skiing from our tax dollars. If, as a kid, you want to cross-country ski, you get the equipment for free. For snowboarding, it wasn’t like that. Maybe for racing you can get government funding, but you have to quit your sponsors and follow the national program.”
Wolle was a part of the second generation of Zillertal skaters and boarders, and he dropped into a culture with a DIY attitude. Among his group was Steve Gruber. “Steve was the initiator for our first mini-ramps,” Wolle says. “I met him when he was 13 and [he was] cruising around town in a self-built go-cart with an electric motor. I think [the motor] was the starter from a pickup truck attached to an auto battery. He was always the guy who built stuff and got the rest of us excited to build stuff as well.”
With no street spots to speak of, a tight crew of locals built mini-ramps and dug their own halfpipes. They did so in a bit a bubble. “Eventually a Thrasher or Transworld or a German skate mag made it to the newspaper stand,” Wolle remembers, “but they were two-years old by the time they made it to the valley. Snowboarding was not known. It was forbidden. You had to have a leash. It was looked at like a joke. Those jokes are still around, and we still roll with it. We were always involved in getting something going. The competitions didn’t happen around Zillertal—you had to drive an hour or more to get into pipe riding. Snowboarding [at home] was more about freeriding.”
Wolle and his crew rode the whole mountain, freestyling off natural features, making their way to Innsbruck to connect with the growing snowboard culture, especially in the summer. “You always had pros around for summer camps,” Wolle says. “Craig Kelly, all those big names, were visiting Innsbruck in the summer to do their catalog shoots. There was a strong snowboard scene on the glacier then. It took the resorts a long time to come around and build parks, but once they realized how many people would come to ride them, they started building big ones pretty quick.”
Through competitions in the area and the folks at Onboard Magazine, came some opportunities for exposure, but sponsorship dollars were minimal for Austrian riders in the ’90s. Wolle went to school in Mayrhofen, then studied physical therapy for a year. He got a summer job as an electrician in a hospital, worked as a masseuse in a hotel and spent a year working in an ambulance in lieu of military service.
Meanwhile, Wolle hooked up with K2 for a couple years, then switched to Salomon Snowboards. Salomon gave him a travel budget and “it was two years of partying with my friends,” he says with a laugh. He’d also taken up surfing, making the 16-hour drive to the legendary waves of Hossegor, France to camp on the beach on the regular. It was a cruisey lifestyle, to say the least. But his big break came when he joined Absinthe Films for their first release, Tribal, in 2000.
“Absinthe fit our style of snowboarding better than competition,” Wolle says. “They understand it’s all about having fun with your friends at the end of the day. I really learned the ropes filming with them, but I still didn’t have a ton of sponsor support.”
Wolle’s style shined through with Absinthe—a fluid approach to fall-line riding, powerful turns peppered with technical tricks bred through years of skating, surfing and charging the Austrian Alps. He grew with the company, building slowly, part after part, until 2007. That’s when Wolle broke through as one of the best riders in the world.
“At the end of the day, you can worry about a lot of things,” Wolle says. “The art is to ride how you want to ride on the best of the days. In 2007, something clicked.”
It was a poor snow year for much of North America, but Wolle went to Alaska toward the end of the season. He’d been riding Alaska for several years by then and conditions looked good. But the trip began with a near-death experience. “I was hiking a ridge searching for an entry to a line while Justin [Hostynek of Absinthe Films] and Nico [Müller] were shooting around the corner. I knew there was a big cornice on the ridge. I was 50 feet away, but still too close. Hiking back in my own bootsteps there was a huge crack and I started tumbling down with a 40-foot cornice, getting rolled over without a board. I reached the bottom and I wasn’t hurt or buried—nothing happened and everything was OK. It made me want to focus on the positive things in life.”
Wolle understood the accident as a simple miscalculation that could have led to devastating consequences. After the heli picked him up, he strapped right back in. “I had some good runs that day, and after that, some amazing days,” Wolle says. “Everything’s a process. When you ride AK, you build confidence in certain conditions, making the right decisions at the right times. Everybody puts a lot of money and effort into getting you there. In the end it’s just details, but it takes years to learn. Certain days it really clicks.”
Cornice mishaps aside, Wolle put it all together that year. He opened Absinthe’s Optimistic? by launching into Alaskan faces, spinning off spines, buttering off pillows, bonking snow ghosts. He played the mountains of AK and interior British Columbia like a skatepark. The next year, he threw down for Ready. Wolle was voted Rider of the Year in the 2008 TransWorld Rider’s Poll, at the age of 30.
This is the part of the story where most riders would cash in, sign that big contract, maybe get an agent and an energy drink sponsor, then coast toward legend status. But Wolle didn’t stray from his course. Perhaps because he’d already been in the game so long he didn’t feel the need to blow up. “I love snowboarding and I got super lucky to have great sponsors,” Wolle says. “It was always good to not have a manager, to be happy with what you’ve got. The relationships with those companies turned into friendships. They keep me motivated. Why change that?”
—Wolle Nyvelt
“In a way, Wolle’s become ageless because he always seems to keep it new school with the stuff he’s doing,” Sullivan says. “Whether through his Äsmo pow surfers or through his board designs with Salomon, he’s been able to push the progression of skate and surf style in snowboarding. He’s bringing stuff to the table that people haven’t seen before, constantly. He’s had the same sponsors for most of his career because he’s not greedy. He gets paid less than some of the top dogs, but he’s avoided cuts on his end when the budgets are getting cut.”
“He’s also really smart and aware and calculated, while, at the same time, he’s mellow,” Sullivan continues. “He doesn’t try to force things. Whether he’s skating, surfing, or snowboarding, he has this amazing natural gift that is quite rare in this culture. He just loves doing it, and he’s constantly pushing himself to progress and find new ways to grow. He’s not trying to be better than everybody or this or that. He’s really just trying to spread the joy and make it better for people who live their lives in a healthy way out in the mountains and in nature.”
Wolle’s design tendencies also budded in the mid-2000s. That’s when he and Gruber launched Äsmo—in 2006, to be exact. Wolle had been riding a traditional snowskate in the early 2000s with a skate deck on top and ski on the bottom, but found it lacked control when the terrain got steeper and the snow got deep. “In 2006, because of lack of snow, we started working on the Äsmo boards,” Wolle says. “We thought riding without bindings was a great concept to bring back. We saw so much potential with what the first snowboard builders were doing in the late ’70s, but it’s not a retro thing. There are so many new things you can do with the design of these boards. So, we started experimenting with different shapes and different depths of channels to add grip and leverage for steeper slopes and powder riding.”
By 2010, Gruber and Wolle had purchased a CNC machine so they could create designs in AutoCAD and apply them to the shapes and a press. “It’s not like shaping a surfboard out of foam,” Wolle says. “You put all of those layers together and then press them like a snowboard.”
Äsmo boards have become a coveted commodity in the snowboard underground, with each deck taking 8-10 hours to produce and only about 100 rolling out of their small Mayrhofen factory each year. The boards certainly aren’t toys. Check Wolle’s video parts from the past half-dozen years and you’ll see him ripping pillow lines, airing gaps, spinning, cracking methods—all aboard his finely tuned binding-less creations. It’s not a lucrative endeavor, but it’s one that allows him to expand his mind along with his riding. It allows him to think about snow-sliding in a new and inventive way, whether conceptualizing behind a computer screen or dropping into lines with nothing but a leash connecting him to his sled.
It’s also allowed him to spend summers close to home with his young family. “I can’t imagine my life without kids anymore,” Wolle says. “I’ve got an awesome wife, she’s down with snowboarding—we all love the mountains, we ride together, and they are down for adventures. I think it’s just about being happy, you know? And trying to be a good example and going out and charging and then passing that onto your kids. It’s all about whatever makes them happy.”
Snow-sliding makes Wolle happy. Perhaps he keeps it fresh by necessity, to ensure he remains as enthralled with snowboarding now as he was 25 years ago when he first strapped in. At age 39, he’s continuing to grow and evolve as a snowboarder, as a designer, as a human.
“Why did I do this? Because it makes me feel good,” Wolle says. “And there’s so much to learn; there’s so much interesting history. There’s building boards, the whole artistic side of it, going filming, shooting photos. You work with all these different people and it’s like a team sport in a way, but you can express yourself. With snowboarding, you’re free, like dancing. I’m a bad dancer, but I love snowboarding.”
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