NEW FAVORITE GUY THE HUMBLE BEAST MATT WAINHOUSE PEAKS LATE Words Ben Shanks Kindlon MATT WAINHOUSE has always been a late bloomer. Between the chiseled chin and broad shoulders held up by his solid frame, at first glance you’d probably guess he captained his varsity football team. But in high school, Matt claims to have felt like a pipsqueak. “I was only 95 pounds when I was 16 years old, always smaller than everybody else,” he says. “I was always the littlest kid, the smallest kid, the last one to hit their growth spurt. I feel like it kind of put a chip on my shoulder.” Matt’s snowboarding career is flourishing in a similarly belated fashion. His riding has been well-respected in the Pacific Northwest for the better part of a decade, but after landing the opening segment in Absinthe Film’s 2019 feature, Isle of Snow , the snowboarding com-munity at large is taking notice. The 31-year-old’s success follows an unusual trajectory in a field full of talented young upstarts, but Matt takes it—like he does most things—in stride. “To film for your first big movie at 30… I’m not sure that’s ever happened,” he says. “I think about it all the time—peaking late.” Matt was born in spring ‘88 to parents who met on a chairlift in in winter ’83. “My dad actually ditched his buddy to get onto the lift with my mom who was loading ahead of them,” he says with a laugh. That chance encounter in Sun Valley, ID would lead Matt’s dad, Wilf, cross-continent from Toronto to be with Matt’s mom, Diane, in Both-ell, WA. Bothell is where Diane grew up, and where the couple raised their kids and still live today. Wilf worked in construction for nearly four decades, climbing the ladder from production engineer to chief operating officer of Sellen Construction, while Diane owned and oper-ated a furniture store. Both avid skiers, Wilf and Diane had Matt and his older sister, Lauren, on the slopes at Stevens Pass, WA by the ripe ages of 3 and 5 years old. Matt skied weekly until he was 10 years old, but that quickly changed when he found his own soon-to-be true love at Sun Valley. “We were on a family trip and my dad rented a snowboard for himself, me and my sister, and we all went together for my first time,” he says. But snowboarding didn’t immediately consume Matt’s life—that obsession would set in a bit later. He remained a steadfast weekend warrior, and rode like one too. “I was never a prodigy, and my parents never put me in a snowboard program,” Matt says. “Our crew just ripped around and straight-aired all the jumps. We had no idea of what was cool and what was smart. We’d send the biggest rock to flat landing and be like, ‘Yeah, we hit it!’” During his younger years, baseball was a bigger priority. “But I was tiny,” Matt says. “I was coordinated, but I couldn’t hit the ball with any power, so I had to quit. It was tough. Then I wrestled for five years throughout junior high and high school, and that took a lot of time away from being on the mountain. I was in the lowest weight class and in junior high I was pretty good, but when I got to high school I got pounded. Dudes were cutting to get to 103 pounds, and I was still like seven pounds underneath that, so I’d get tossed.” 102 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
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