The U.S. medal hopes in tonight’s men’s snowboard big air finals rest on one young man — Ollie Martin, a curious case when it comes to the event.
Big air amounts to each rider taking one, big, audacious heave from the top of a 50-foot ramp and attempting a single trick. Theoretically, every run is an attempt at the extreme, going for the biggest, best trick.
Martin is a 17-year-old senior in high school. He was born in New Zealand, but raised mostly in Colorado and calls the Vail Valley home. You would think he’d be planning to bust out the biggest, most daring, most dangerous trick in his bag. You would be wrong.
“The way I look at it — I have a lot of my life ahead of me, and more things that I want to achieve, and I’m just not willing to try something dangerous just because it’s going to get me an extra position (on the leaderboard),” Martin told me last month during a long chat in Aspen.
Martin wants clean, consistent, proficient tricks. Wherever that puts him at the end of the competition, so be it.
“There’s no trick out there that I want to do just to say I can do it,” he said.
Martin, the bronze winner in the 2025 big air world championship, reached tonight’s final thanks to a backside 1800 Indy and a frontside 180-mute in qualifications, finishing ninth out of 30 to make the 12-man cut.
While Martin is a medal hopeful, it will be a tall task to make the podium.
China’s Yiming Su, the 2022 gold medalist, remains the favorite, while stars Hiroto Ogiwara, Kira Kimura, Taiga Hasegawa and Ryoma Kimata are capable of delivering a Japanese podium sweep.
Italy’s Ian Matteoli, a 20-year-old from Torino, finished a surprise second in qualifications and will be the local favorite.