American upstart a lifelong daredevil
Julia Marino and gravity were never really a great pair. To her, everything was a launching pad: furniture, household objects, playground equipment.
“She was always on the lookout for something to jump off of,” said her father, John Marino.
It resulted, ultimately, in a spot on the U.S. Olympic team for the 20-year-old Marino, but when she was younger, it was often a cause for alarm.
When she was 11 months old, she insisted on climbing up the playground slide backward. When she was 2½ years old, she banged a wrench against her bicycle, trying to remove the training wheels. On her first day of kindergarten, the principal called to say that the energetic girl had somehow scaled a wall.
“The principal said, ‘We don’t know how she did it, and we don’t think adults could do it. But if you could just please tell her not to do that again, we’d appreciate it,’” her father recalled.
Turns out, it was all early training for a meteoric snowboarding career and what could be a memorable Pyeongchang Games.
Marino, from Westport, Connecticut, began seriously snowboarding six years ago and finds herself as a medal threat in two Olympic events — slopestyle and big air — having enjoyed perhaps the quickest rise of any U.S. Olympian.
Slopestyle is a snowboarder’s playground, an obstacle course that calls on competitors to do a series of tricks off different elements. Big air, making its Olympic debut, requires riders to perform a single mindnumbing trick, starting atop a 160-foot ramp and launching off a hill angled 40 degrees. It’s not for the faint of heart.
“It’s nerve-wracking,” Elaine Marino said of her daughter’s perilous pursuits. “I remember at USA Nationals watching her compete. She went flying over the first jump, and I remember my knees actually got weak. A man next to me grabbed me and said, ‘Are you OK?’”
The Marinos are still getting accustomed to all of this. Just a couple of years ago, Julia’s name was a faint dot on the Pyeongchang radar.
Julia Marino started skiing at 3½ on the family’s annual winter vacations to Beaver Creek, Colorado. When she was around 12, she broke a ski on the mountain; rather than rent new skis, her father insisted that she use an available snowboard.
“She grumbled and wasn’t too happy about it,” her father said.
But, she added, “after a couple of days, I really began to enjoy it.”
By 14, she was attending Stratton Mountain School, a Vermont boarding school for skiers and snowboarders, and at 15, she was living and training full time in Colorado, taking high school classes online.
Still, she was young in the sport, mostly snowboarding in amateur and local competitions. She entered her first World Prix event through a back door. Boston’s Fenway Park hosted a big-air event in 2016, barely 2½ hours from the family’s home. An 18-year-old Julia Marino entered but was an alternate. When an injury to a teammate opened a spot, she not only competed but stunned the field by winning.
Less than two years later, she’s a podium favorite in every event she enters. At last year’s X Games Aspen, she won gold in slopestyle and bronze in big air, and then at X Games Oslo, she won silver in big air and bronze in slopestyle. She recently took silver in slopestyle at X Games Aspen, finishing second to Jamie Anderson, an American who was the 2014 Olympic champion.
“Julia is amazing,” said Anderson, 27. “She reminds me a lot of my younger self. She’s a free spirit, loves to be outside, walks around barefoot. And she’s only getting better.”