The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.3
SAGE KOTENSBURG ON GO MODE
Words: Ben Shanks Kindlon 2022-11-30 08:27:33
“We were staying in Hossegor, France, right in the dunes by Plage des Estagnots. We were there for an event and Sage had just recorded a ‘Looking Sideways’ podcast episode with Matt Barr, where they talked a lot about Sage’s experiences around the Olympics. Sage really got into describing how it had affected his mental health and confidence. I wanted the accompanying photos to be intimate and show a different side of Sage, who is always so generous and comes across as very fun-loving. It had been 110 degrees Fahrenheit all week and our place didn’t have air conditioning, so everyone was pretty exhausted. Sometimes during portrait shoots I’ll ask people to close their eyes to reset and Sage held his closed for a while. He really scrunched up his face, so I took a couple of shots because it seemed like he got a bit thoughtful during that moment.” Photos: Owen Tozer
For a world-renowned snowboarder who’s had his picture plastered across Wheaties cereal boxes, Sage Kotsenburg is surprisingly approachable. Versatile, too. A lively rider you’re as likely to see lapping your local park as you are in a competition on your TV. But behind Sage’s laid-back exterior has often lurked the restless mind of a calculated competitor. If his battle is with you, there’s a strong chance you’ll be looking up at him on the podium when the day is done. Yet after first-place finishes aplenty, Sage has found that the real war has always been within himself. He’s forced to continually relearn that inner peace always prevails. Generally, the gold medals have been easier for him to grasp.
Sage has had skin in the game his whole life. Born in Coeur d’Alene, ID, he moved to Park City, UT, at the age of 5 and started competing locally by the time he turned 7. Only a few years later, during a trip to Mt. Hood, OR, with his family, Sage found himself in front of Quiksilver’s then-marketing manager, Brian Craighill. “My mom had footage of me, [older brother] Blaise and [younger sister] Kirra on a DVD,” he says with a laugh. “We showed it to Brian in the back of our car on one of those mini players. That’s when I met [Bryan] Fox too.”
Ever since the start of Sage’s snowboarding career, his parents, Steve and Carol Ann, were down to facilitate. “They grew up surfing around California,” Sage explains. “My dad is from Burbank and my mom is from a similar area. My mom’s family would go down to San Onofre and camp when she was growing up, so they already kind of understood snowboarding when they came to the mountains. They were like, ‘We get this lifestyle. We can rock with it.’ When we started taking snowboarding more seriously it helped because they understood the process a bit from seeing it through their surf background. My dad still rides as much as he can; he’s 71. He’ll call me like, ‘Are you watching Pipeline right now? It’s firing!’ They’re shred-heads till the day they die.”
Shred-heads, sure, but not your average. It’s worth noting that along with managing the operating room at one of Salt Lake City’s hospitals, Carol Ann would regularly run 70 to 80 miles per week and Steve juggled work in real estate with training for triathlons. When Sage’s riding started taking more serious turns, his parents were on board for him to pursue it professionally, but not if he was going to half-ass it. That’s just the way they are, and presumably where Sage gets it from. During his teens Sage transitioned from public school to homeschooling to allow for more time to practice, travel and compete.
“That’s how I was raised: Work hard,” he says. “With snowboarding it was like, ‘You’re going to work your ass off at it or let it be a hobby and go to school. We’re not going to just chill with you while you go to contests and get 30th place.’ I never got yelled at by them for doing bad or anything like that; they just wanted to see the passion behind stuff. So, even to this day, I still operate on that. Anything I want to do, I give it 100 percent. That’s all I know.”
With a tenacious drive to not only be the best he can be but, even more so, to be the best around, Sage’s competitiveness started showing during his youth. He’d sit slope side studying his competition, hike for hours on end to learn and improve upon progressive tricks and go far out of his way—and many times for broke—to try to be noticed. Sage’s sheer will to improve coupled with his unwavering commitment to see things through slowly but surely brought him to equal footing with riders he regularly surveyed—the same riders he’d eventually surpass. This led to success throughout various Dew Tours, X Games, Grand Prix and more, all while producing video parts with both street and powder snowboarding. The kid had become a standout, primed for an opportunity of a lifetime. Despite his distaste for some of snowboarding’s structured aspects, coaches especially, Sage set his sights on the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where slopestyle would be making its debut appearance. He saw it as being too good to pass up, and maybe he could have a positive impact on how the world views snowboarding.
“I love competing, but going to FIS events, having to get on the national team and all that was sucking it out of me,” Sage says. “It was two different sides of snowboarding inside of me battling it out. I’d try to bring a little bit of the core, punk rock vibe into it, but in the end, I joined the team. Bill Enos was our coach. We butted heads at first and didn’t like each other. We had to have this big conversation about it. I ended up giving him a chance and it was really helpful for me. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to other people and pull out of the Olympics. I’m glad I worked through it and really found myself in the process. It was like, ‘The world’s not perfect, but maybe we should just show up and show everyone what snowboarding is all about.’ Enos told me to just roll through the whole process as myself, and that was the best advice anyone gave me for a contest.”
Anything I want to do, I give it 100 percent. That’s all I know.
After nearly missing his connecting flight following team processing (and a lot of partying) in Munich, Sage won gold in the slopestyle event in Sochi. He upset the favored Mark McMorris by incorporating stylish flat spins into his run rather than sticking to ascendant triple corks, and even landed his signature “Holy Crail” in the process—a corked 1260 with a double-grab Japan and Crail. His inventive approach was widely celebrated, and “Holy Crail” became the title of a web series that launched soon after Sage’s Olympic win. Upon his return to the United States, then-20-year-old-Sage was immediately met with a mountain of mainstream media attention. At the time, he was higher than he’d ever been. But despite a lifetime of proper planning, practice and performance, the subsequent lows were something he had never prepared for.
“I had all these media opportunities in the U.S. and was taking them,” Sage says. “It put me in a media spotlight all over the world. I couldn’t walk around New York without people coming up to me. It was rad, but I got super over it. I ended up saying no to going to the Oscars and went on a pow trip with Halldor [Helgason] and Ethan Morgan instead. That was kind of the end to my Olympic thing. I never wanted to compete again. I was over it. I got lost. I didn’t know where I stood in snowboarding. It was this super-defeating feeling. I got super depressed. I would ride and just be a ghost. People were like, ‘Are you going to go to the Olympics again?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t even know if I want to snowboard anymore.’ I was fearful to not ever be on that level again, and I let my fear consume me. I lost all my competitive drive. I lost my love for snowboarding. I lost so much in the process because I knew I was never going to have that experience again. That shook me. It was a couple of pretty shitty years for sure.”
Sage had finally arrived at the top. Instead of viewing it as a job well done, he pondered what higher could look like. That breathed new life into his critical inner voice, causing him to choke in contests and ultimately leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortunately, in between blowing it at comps and bumming it on the couch, Sage’s friends took him to go film clips. Sometimes they’d take a break from filming to simply snowboard.
“I remember not being hyped on snowboarding until I was on a film trip,” Sage says. “So much changed mentally that I had to rewire my whole brain to get back into snowboarding. But getting a clip a day was what I found—not to make it sound corny—became my new competition, and I found this new love for [snowboarding]. It was a different mindset. I told my boss at Monster, Cody Dresser, that I couldn’t compete anymore. He was like, ‘Cool. What’re you going to do?’ I said, ‘I just want to film.’ And he was like, ‘Damn right! We’re stoked on that.’”
As Sage’s blinders started to come off, he realized the only person seriously stressing out about his snowboarding—the only one asking too much of him and whose opinions really mattered—was himself. He’d achieved a remarkable goal on top of an already incredible stat sheet. The only thing left to do was finally allow himself to enjoy it. That’s when he decided he should only continue with contests if his heart was invested 100 percent. And if there was anyone out there who felt otherwise, screw ’em.
“Being too hard on myself finally caught up,” Sage says. “I’d been sitting here stressing about my life and career, while everyone just wants me to snowboard. I realized going out and snowboarding is the best thing, and all the other stuff that comes along with it like the mental process can be good, but like with anything, it comes with a toll. Go mode all the time is hard. It can be fun while you’re in it, but you’ve got to take a break every now and then. There’s a limit to it. You can’t just keep going. No one can. I look back now and I laugh. I was so hard on myself. I kept it internally and wouldn’t tell anyone about it and I learned my lesson for sure.”
A far cry from his past modus operandi, Sage now regularly shares what’s on his mind, proudly emitting what he tastefully refers to as “diarrhea of the mouth.” In 2018 he joined up with with Lick the Cat, a crew of riders including Spencer Schubert, Nils Mindnich and more, to put together a full-length video showcasing the quirkier side of these now widely acclaimed pros. On paper, it was one of Sage’s least productive years to date. In his heart, it’s one of his most cherished.
I was fearful to never be on that level again, and I let that fear consume me.
“We got skunked on trips, didn’t have much footy, I wasn’t competing anymore…” Sage says, “but I had so much fun, because we were getting back to what we got into this sport and this lifestyle for in the first place, which is snowboarding with your friends. Both routes are cool. If you’re going to buckle down for four years for the Olympics, you’ve got to go in with that driven mentality, but you can’t exert yourself for that long and expect your mind and body to just be going green light after green light.”
Upon feeling properly refueled and reinvigorated, Sage came out swinging in boundary-breaking backcountry films such as Joy (2019) and Halcyon (2020), with his role in the latter earning him Snowboarder Magazine’s Rider of the Year award. The videos showcase an absolute onslaught from Sage, who threw down on freshly found features and classic kickers alike—often building the latter larger than many of the professionals who first pioneered the gaps.
Presenting just as much poise riding powder as he did icy park jumps in the Olympics nearly a decade prior, in January 2022 Sage blended his backcountry prowess with his honed ability to perform under the pressure of judged runs to win the Natural Selection Tour in Jackson Hole, WY. The 29-year-old’s competition during the first leg of the event included Travis Rice, creator of the Natural Selection Tour and arguably the greatest backcountry snowboarder of all time, thus demonstrating that no matter the terrain, Sage is one of the best to ever do it—so long as he remembers to brake when his body says red light.
I’ve been through hell and back with it, mentally and physically
Along with filming a few clips for K2 Snowboarding’s “Landscape” video, Sage went to the second stop of the NST at Baldface Lodge, BC, where he qualified to ride in the last stop of the Tour in the Alaskan backcountry. After being knocked out by Torstein Horgmo in the quarterfinals, Sage kept his energy high. He kept traveling, went Rambo at Monster Hell Week in Europe, bopped around to various community events in the States, took a powder trip to Chile, and recently rode at the Stomping Grounds Park in Switzerland. Despite all that, Sage almost sheepishly describes his recent roll as a rather slow one. As if he hasn’t earned the right to a slower year—as if such a schedule could be considered slow. But that’s Sage for you—forever setting the bar a few fingers higher. He continually reaches what most would consider admirable peaks, yet it seems that Sage sees them simply as another lap in the park, one serviced by a high-speed lift that nearly never stops spinning.
“Snowboarding is the best thing and I’ve been through hell and back with it, mentally and physically,” Sage says. “All the accolades along the way were awesome and I worked so hard for them. But I still have some more goals that I want to do in the next five years. I’m so excited to see where it’s going and where it leads.
“This year I was honest with my sponsors and myself. I knew I’d go to Natural Selection but in between that I told them I’d just ride. I didn’t want to put out a part this year. I just wanted to snowboard. It was so sick. It brought me back and helped me realize that I’ve grown as a person, just being honest with myself and saying when I need a break. Now I’m taking it day by day, and I truly feel the energy like when I was 16 and just coming onto the scene. I’m so excited to get out with everyone and ride and film. I let my batteries recharge. Now I’m ready to go again.”
In classic amiable fashion Sage keeps his vision of what’s to come joyously vague. This break—if we can really call it that—was something like the eye of a storm. The build before the drop. Truth be told, he’s rearing to be back in go mode.
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