MADDIE MASTRO

It’s the morning of the 2025 Laax Open in Switzerland—a cold, clear mid-January day. A 24-year-old Maddie Mastro is gearing up for a World Cup event the one way she knows how: by watching The Office. She’s eating oatmeal at the kitchen counter in her rental apartment, with Michael Scott droning on in the background. Then, she’s brushing her teeth, getting on her layers, and yep, Jim and Pam are there, too, chatting away in a meeting. Mastro likes how lighthearted the show is, how unserious it feels. She’s been doing this since her Olympic debut, back in 2018. 

By the time Mastro gets in the car to drive to the hill, she’s turned The Office off and cranked the music. Her go to is Spiderbait, and a chorus that repeats: “You’re fucking awesome.” Now she’s locked in. At the top of the pipe, she drops into run one and stomps her signature double crippler right out of the gate.

On her second run, Mastro builds, adding more risk and complexity. She opens with a frontside double cork 1080—a trick no woman had yet landed in competition. Then, she follows it up with a second double, another first for women’s halfpipe. It’s a dream run and it earns her second place, behind fellow American and two-time Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim. 

Later, Mastro’s on the podium, spraying champagne all over a platform in the Swiss Alps with a huge grin on her face. And that’s when it happens: Mastro—who’s just done something nobody in women’s snowboarding has ever done—slips in the puddle beneath her boots and goes down hard. She’s embarrassed for a fleeting second, then laughs, gets back on her feet and chugs from the bottle. 

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