Snow Sports NZ athlete of the year Zoi Sadowski Synnott.

SUE WARDS

While some Wanaka high school students are spending their summer holidays enjoying sleep-ins, sun and socialising, 16-year-old Zoi Sadowski Synnott is back on the snow, training hard for the Olympic Games.

Zoi, a Mount Aspiring College student, will represent New Zealand in snowboard slopestyle and snowboard big air at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in February.

The young snowboarder was selected for the New Zealand team in October after she won both a World Championships silver and World Cup gold in slopestyle. The Snow Sports NZ Snowboarder of the Year 2017 and Overall Athlete of the Year 2017, she is currently ranked third on the FIS slopestyle list.

The Wanaka App caught up with Zoi by telephone as she was enroute to Breckenridge, Colorado this weekend.

Zoi has lived in Wanaka since she was six, moving here with her family from Sydney. Her parents leased the Snow Park back then, providing their five children with plenty of access to the snow. Although Zoi learned to ski as a pre-schooler, she remembers not particularly liking it.

"I just didn’t like skiing. It was weird having two separate things on your feet,” she said. Trying out snowboarding for the first time at the age of nine, she thought: "This is so much more fun, so much more free.”

Zoi in action.

Zoi’s competitive side surfaced quickly. "I started off playing soccer and I always wanted to win,” she said. Her first snowboard lesson at the Snow Park was with her older sister Reilly, who had had lessons before.

"I was so competitive about it and tried to surpass her. I was always trying to keep up with my older brothers snowboarding.”

Zoi is also a skateboarder, and in those first years in Wanaka the family owned the property with the ‘dream ramp’. "We were really lucky to have that in our backyard. In winter all the ski and snowboard pros would come out and we’d get to see them skate.”

She has been dreaming about the Olympics since she was 10-years-old. "At school we made pictures of what we wanted to do in our lives, and mine had the Olympic rings on it.”

Being selected for the Winter Olympics team in October was a thrill. "It was really exciting, then we realised we had to keep putting in the work. I guess it’s a waiting game until then.”

Despite being a little nervous about getting injured before the event, she said, "I feel like I’m in a pretty good place. Just as long as I’m snowboarding, it will be fine. Just like any other comp.”

A podium or a gold medal would be the best, she said, "but anything else: I’ll take it.”

Zoi has been described as "snowboarding like a boy”, which she thinks may be because she mostly snowboards with boys. She also thinks she has a lower stance on the board than some female snowboarders. "I try to look like I’m putting in an effort to ride,” she explained.

"When I watch other people ride, I watch people whose style I like and try to adjust my style to be more like theirs.” She cited Cardrona’s Christy Prior as an example. "I’ve always liked her riding, she has her own style.”

Zoi thinks living and training in Wanaka has given her a competitive edge in the sport. "When I first started properly competing I was only doing New Zealand winters, so I was putting all my effort into two or three months rather than nine months like other girls. I was trying to catch up to the girls I wanted to compete with, and asking myself, ‘am I doing what they’re doing’?”

Her coach Mitch Brown helped, pushing her to do things she sometimes didn’t want to do, such as learning the dub-cat ("It’s just like a double flip”) about a year ago. "I didn’t want to do it, it was real scary. But I learnt it.”

"If you commit, you’ll most likely land, and if you don’t, just get up and try again,” she said matter-of-factly.

Wanaka’s weather has also been an advantage, she said. "In Wanaka we don’t get the best weather, it’s really on and off. But we still get up there and train.” So in overseas competitions, "you know you can snowboard in really bad weather”.

Another advantage has been attending MAC, which allowed her to attend two or three days a week in the winter. "It’s been really, really good. They’re really cool about it.” Having friends at school who snowboard with her has helped too, she said. "It’s the life everyone ‘gets’.”

Zoi will spend the next two weeks in Colorado, and compete in one or two World Cup events, then it’s on to Japan for a week before heading to South Korea for the Olympics, which take place from February 9 to 25.

"My family keep me really grounded. I’m really grateful for their support - and my coaches (Mitch Brown, Sean Thompson, Tom Willmott), and all my sponsors - Red Bull, Snow Sports NZ, and High Performance Sport NZ.”

PHOTOS: Red Bull