A New Wave of Slopestyle Talent Has Joined the American Olympic Team

It was December 20, 2025, and a young snowboarder sat at a picnic table outside the Ski Hill Grill at the base of Peak 8. She ate chicken tenders and talked to someone on the phone. She sat alone.

If you were visiting Colorado on vacation with your family or taking your lunch break outside to take advantage of the winter sunshine, you probably walked past her without thinking twice. I mean, if you had a dollar for every time you walked past a teenager eating chicken tenders outside at a resort, you’d at least have enough money to actually buy some chicken tenders.

The teenager’s name? Jess Perlmutter. Just a day earlier, she’d won the Rockstar Energy Open Rail Jam. Just a day later, she’d lose in the semifinals to her childhood idol Jamie Anderson in the park style contest, where she went on to take third place.  

A month after that, she was named to the U.S. Olympic slopestyle team.

Perlmutter is in Italy for the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games with fellow 16-year-old Lily Dhawornvej and elder stateswoman of the group Hahna Norman, who is the only member of the trio who is old enough to vote or buy a lottery ticket, at 21 years old. This is the first Olympics for all three riders.

None of the women who qualified for the slopestyle in 2022 made the team for 2026, thanks to a wide range of circumstances. Julia Marino spent the last two years recovering from a knee injury, only to break her ankle her first day back on the hill. Hailey Langland is also taking a break from contests as she recovers from a torn ACL, and will miss her first Olympics since 2018. Jamie Anderson started to train and ride just four months after giving birth to her youngest daughter, Nova Sky, and while the goal was to make it back for her fourth Olympic Games, she fell just short. 

The metaphorical torch was passed so suddenly and so abruptly that the magnitude of this moment has not quite been appropriately appreciated. When Anderson beat Perlmutter in the Rockstar Energy Open semifinals, Perlmutter openly talked about how incredible it was to go up against someone she grew up idolizing.

“Gosh, I think I have about 20 years on a lot of these girls, which is crazy,” Anderson said after she came in second to Finnish rider Telma Särkipaju in the final. “It’s incredible to see. I’m happy to be out here with the young guns.”

Dhawornvej was on fire during the semifinals day of that contest, finishing in the top spot with a score of 95. She was upset in the first round of the finals day. If you thought that might affect her mentally, it didn’t appear to. Just a few weeks later, Dhawornvej finished the Laax Open slopestyle contest in second place overall.

As for Norman, making it to the Olympics this time around can be seen as a bit of a revenge tour. She was making a push to qualify for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing when she tore her ACL.

“I just remember thinking, ‘wow, I just want to give everything I have to be at the next one,'” she told Vail Daily in a 2025 interview.

She gave it all she had, and it worked.

The former ski racer got into snowboarding because of its carefree nature.  She said in an interview published on the U.S. Ski and Snowboard team’s website back in November that until she was 15 or 16, snowboarding was just a weekend gig that her parents partially used as a daycare service. At 20 years old, she was called up to the U.S. pro team roster after a season that included two top-8 finishes. She finished 15th on the FIS World Points List in Big Air and 16th in slopestyle this season, and earned herself a business trip to Italy.

Both the 16-year-olds burst onto the mainstream suddenly and ferociously in the past two years. Donning a pink helmet, Dhawornvej punched her ticket to the X Games after the streetstyle qualifier at Copper Mountain in 2024. In front of a home crowd, she put down a 50-50 to tame dog to rail transfer sequence that set the internet absolutely ablaze. Then at the X Games Aspen in January, she took home the bronze medal in Knuckle Huck.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JeEkkRBwHlE

Perlmutter qualified for the 2024 Uninvited Invitational via the wild card entry. She rode her way to third place and took home the Subaru Rookie Award worth $1,500 and a $500 ‘Standout Performance’ award. She went on to win Red Bull Heavy Metal Boston in 2025 as a 15-year-old, and then she won the 2025 Uninvited Invitational. Last week, she sloth-rolled and backflipped her way into X Games Knuckle Huck gold.

No other snowboarding discipline has a similar youth movement. There is a 13-year age gap between the youngest—Bea Kim—and the oldest—Maddy Schaffrick—member of the women’s halfpipe team. The same age gap exists on the men’s side, between Alessandro Barbieri and Chase Josey. The gap is 14 years for women’s snowboard cross, and thanks to Nick Baumgartner making the team yet again, don’t even get me started on the age gap in men’s snowboard cross. Only in women’s slopestyle did this change happen all at once.

Women’s slopestyle has progressed at a lightning-fast pace.

For the first time in recent history, the United States does not have a rider who’s favored to podium.

Anderson took home gold in both 2014 and 2018. Marino finished with the silver in 2022. But New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott took the gold in those Olympics and is a heavy favorite to finish among the top 3 this time around. So is Great Britain’s steeziest heavy metalhead, Mia Brookes, who just added her second career X Games gold to her trophy case. Japan’s Kokomo Murase just landed a 1620 in the women’s Big Air contest in X Games, a world’s first in a contest.

The bottom line is that it’s going to be extremely difficult for anyone outside of those three to fight for a podium position.

But the good news? The Americans are just getting started.