How did it feel when you got dropped from the New Zealand team? It was weird and scary but relieving. I was over it, honestly. I was never on the podium; I was always somewhere in the middle. There were a lot of ups and downs, a lot of travel, a lot of injuries. It was something I thought I really liked, but I didn’t actually like it that much, and I didn’t really realize that until after I stopped. And then you moved to America full time. How did you make this possible? Can you explain the green card process a bit? When Possum and I flew in I got red-flagged at the border. I was traveling on an extended visitor visa but had overstayed the previous year. They didn’t send me home, but I had to sort out my athlete visa in six months to come back the following year. We found a house to rent on Craigslist in Mammoth. Luckily, my friend Becky was a lawyer and helped finagle the athlete visa. You need to have sponsors to get an athlete visa with proof of contracts and income. Tanner at Ride helped me out—he made a contract that looked like I was sponsored legit. Meanwhile, I had applied for the green card lottery a few years back. The green card lottery is a crazy process—they pick around 50,000 winners each year from a pool of at least 10 million applicants. In the spring I found out that I made it to the third stage where I have to fly back to New Zealand, do my medical assessment and biometrics, and get an interview in June. Basically, if you make it to the interview process you have won the green card. I flew back to NZ, did the interview, and once I got that green card, I immediately flew back to the US. I knew I didn’t want to spend another winter in NZ. I’d just started hanging out with [boyfriend] Scott [Blum], and we went on a massive summer road trip—to Mount Hood, the Oregon coast, and up to Washington [state]. Hood was a refreshing new experience. I met so many amazing people and started learning about the filming side of snowboarding through Scott and Harrison [Gor-don]. After Hood, I went back to Mammoth and got a job doing room service at the Westin. What was the worst thing you saw in the Mammoth Westin [Re-sort] room service? People that order room service know that I’m coming, so I didn’t see anything too crazy, but there were a couple of sketchy naked people. True or False: did Zac Efron ask you on a date? He came up to me and started to speak in an attempted Kiwi accent and giving me facts about New Zealand. I didn’t actually know who the guy was until the host told me. So, no he didn’t ask me on a date. The barrier to entry for snowboarding can be quite hard, especially for people living in different countries. A lot of success in snow-boarding runs through being marketed in the United States. How did you make it work? Coming from New Zealand, our winters are short, and the brands are distribution companies, so it is tricky to get any support. I rode for Oakley and Ride. They helped with gear, but not financially. Financial support was purely through the New Zealand team and grants from the government. The NZ team would choose a “pinnacle event” each year and you had to place in the top 16 to get a grant. Your position determined how much money you would make—10th through 16th would get maybe $20,000, fifth through 10th would get something like $40,000, and first through fifth you would make even more. I would always go for 16th place because that was enough money for me to get back to the States. At the Olympics I got 15th. Right on the bubble. That was my main goal. I was thrilled because that meant I could snowboard another year. That was my only goal ever: to be able to keep snowboarding. The season after the Olympics, Possum [Torr] and I—I trav-eled with Possum my whole entire competitive life, and she’s my best friend—both got dropped from the New Zealand team at the same time. Luckily, I had that grant, so I had a little bit of in-come coming in and was working in New Zealand. I still wanted to be a snowboarder but was feeling a little lost. We flew over to America together on Halloween [2014] with no place to live. We had been bouncing around ideas and ended up deciding on Mammoth because we’d been there in the spring, and spring in Mammoth is epic. 056 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 22.1: Page 56
