Monday Mix - June 28, 2021

After a week off last week we're back with another edition of the Monday Mix!

Don't know about you guys, but where we are it's HOT. Real hot. Record-breaking levels of hot. Feels-weird-to-think-about-snowboarding-right-now levels of hot. However, just because we're sweating it out on the couch doesn't mean the shred has stopped or that the content tap has been turned off. It's happening, and we're on it.

First things first today let's recognize that Olympic Day 2021 went down on Wednesday of last week. With less than one month to go before the (delayed) start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan, and roughly seven months to go before the big show for our events at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, Olympic Day seemed extra poignant this year as we look forward to celebrating the world's best athletes in this strange new reality.

From our side, we focused in and took a look back at some of the best SBX moments of the past few OWGs, which you can check out here...

If you're the US Snowboard team, however, you're taking a moment to recognize the most decorated Olympic snowboarder of all time - Mr. Shaun White...

If you're PyeongChang 2018 big air gold medallist Sebastien Toutant, you took a second to savour being the first-ever winner of a brand-new addition to the Olympic sport line-up...

Or, if you're Scotty James, you just go straight to the source, as the PyeongChang 2018 halfpipe bronze medallist dropped by the site of the first-ever modern Olympic Games in Athens to soak up the scene, stockpile a little inspiration, and run a blazing solo 100m sprint...

So if the title of this column didn't make it clear enough already, it is Monday, which seems like a good day to revisit that time last summer where Jamie Nicholls almost beaned his wife a water bottle during a backyard stunt session. Like Jamie, we're glad we get to laugh about it instead of hearing about how the divorce proceedings are going...

If your Monday has got you down, maybe look to Sarka Pancochova for a little inspiration, as she picks herself up and dusts herself off after a nasty nose hook to get back up there and get the stomp...

No Monday blues in Emiliano Lauzi's world, as the Italian stoke machine got off the bus and into the shred so fast he forgot to take his backpack off in Les 2 Alpes last week...

More stoke from the always-vibing Reira Iwabuchi, who's going heavy on the airbag training once again this summer and dialing in what is already one of the most progressive trick arsenals in women's snowboarding...

Meanwhile, Laurie Blouin blessed the timeline with one last, cruise-y rail clip from the Canadian spring camp, before she goes into full summer mode for the foreseeable future...

We all know snowboarding probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for skateboarding, which is why we loved it so much when Sequence Mag reposted this insane clip of Eero Ettala and friends taking the sport back to its skate roots, ripping the ramps on a frozen day in Helsinki last November...

Dusty Henricksen knows exactly what we're talking about, as he's on site in Costa Mesa and ripping back-to-backs with skateboard legend Omar Hassan...

Beautiful stuff.

Ok, let's take a minute to run through a little news here, beginning with the ESPN's Espy Awards, where a handful of snowboarding's very best are on the shortlist for Best Action Sports Athlete awards.

On the women's side of things it's Chloe Kim and Zoi Sadwoski-Synnott holding it down for the snowboarders, with Chloe fresh off a comeback season that saw her go a perfect four-for-four with two World Cup wins, X Games gold, and Aspen 2021 World Championships gold in her four competitions entered. Zoi, meanwhile, won her second straight World Championships slopestyle gold and big air silver at Aspen 2021, while also winning the Kreischberg big air World Cup, X Games slopestyle gold, and winning the Jackson Hole stop at the Natural Selections tour.

For the men you'll find a couple more Aspen 2021 World Champions up for the award, as slopestyle gold medallist (as well as double crystal globe winner and X Games big air gold medallist) Marcus Kleveland, and halfpipe gold medallist (as well as X Games halfpipe winner) Yuto Totsuka are both up for the award and very well deserving of your vote. The Espy Awards are going down on July 10, so head HERE to vote now.

Over to snowboard cross for a minute where Nelly Moenne-Loccoz, who retired at the end of the 2019/20 season, has found her way back into the SBX mix, as she's signed on as a coach for the French team for 2021/22. It could be a pretty inspiring/intimidating experience for the French up-and-comers to have a coach who could also probably still be out there earning World Cup podiums...👀

Read the full story HERE.

This one has us super stoked - Ugandan ripper Brolin Mawejje sat down with climber and filmmaker extraordinaire Jimmy Chin for an intimate discussion which was made into a film called A Conversation that premiered at the Mountainfilm Festival over the Memorial Day weekend in the US. Can't wait to see this...

Back to some more SBX news, as Transfer Snow's "The Dump" podcast sat down with PyeongChang 2018 silver medallist Jarryd Hughes (and Vancouver 2010 halfpipe gold medallist Torah Bright) for a thoroughly entertaining conversation last week...

While we're on the topic of Australian SBX, the most touching news of last week came to us from Mt Buller, where the athlete accommodations at the Olympic Training Centre have been named "Chumpy's Lodge" in honour of the late Alex "Chumpy" Pullin, where Chumpy's loved one's and teammates on hand to dedicate the facility...

Actually, scratch that. The most touching/incredible news of the week came a couple days later, when Chumpy's partner Ellidy Vlug announced that she was pregnant with their baby, via in vitro fertilization aka IVF...

Unreal.

Ok, let's get back to a little riding as we close this thing out here today. Here's Hiroaki Kunitake giving himself a a hand as he hits rewind on a rail in at the indoor slope somewhere in Japan...

Here's Cool Wakishima opening up the season at Cardrona with a steezy set of rail bangers...

Here's Alberto Maffei, dropping a heavy one from midseason in Laax...

And here's a little teaser of more good stuff to come from Toby Miller who, like dozens of other riders who are descending on Oregon right now, is looking forward to getting down to business at Mt. Hood summer camp beginning this week...

You know what? After looking back on that from the last week or so, we're feeling good too, Toby. To celebrate - and to finish things off for today's Mix - let's take a cue from Klaudia Medlova and backflip our way on out of Monday and into another great week...

See ya next week!