Cool Wakushima has signalled her intentions in her first season on the world snowboard circuit, determined to put her unforgettable name up in lights.
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott now has Kiwi snowboarding company in the top flight of her sport.
When she won her second consecutive world championship slopestyle title last month – becoming the first athlete, male or female, to achieve the feat – 20-year-old Sadowski-Synnott was not the only competitor in the final with the designation NZL beside her name.
Step forward Cool Wakushima, an 18-year-old who has made sizeable steps in her first season among the heavy hitters on the World Cup circuit.
Born in Japan, Wakushima moved to New Zealand with her family at age eight and settled in Queenstown.
Having taken the plunge this season to test herself and challenge the world’s best, Wakushima grabbed her opportunity.
Her first event was that world championship in Aspen, Colorado when she qualified for the final and placed eighth.
A seventh placing at Silvaplana, Switzerland, in her third World Cup was a satisfying way to finish her debut campaign.
Her coach, Snow Sports New Zealand high performance snowboard coach and former double Olympic representative Mitch Brown, is impressed.
“What she’s learnt has been great and will only help her in years to come. She will be challenging the podium,” he says.
But back to that name. Cool.
“My Mum chose my name,” Wakushima says. “I don’t think she had anything in mind when she named me.”
And, no surprise, it gets noticed. “Yep, a lot, and it is on my passport. ‘Ooh, that’s a cool name’, things like that,” she laughs.
Brown admits when he first started working with her last year, “I had to say to her, ‘look I say cool a lot’. She said ‘don’t worry about it; I get it all the time’.”
Even from officials, it seems.
In the start gate at Silvaplana, the starter radioed through to the judges her name and number.
“Oh that’s a cool name,” he told her. That’s enough of the gags, and if she tires of the play on her name it doesn’t show.
After all, she’s living the dream right now.
Her mother, Yuko, and her brothers, Ryusei and Anru, older and younger than her respectively, all snowboard.
“Ryusei used to snowboard a lot and that’s where I kind of got it from,” Wakushima says.
“I was always at the mountain anyway, so I just got out of the stage of just sledding and jumped on his old board.”
She finished Wakatipu High School last year and is taking psychology papers at Massey University.
Her progress has been rapid. Wakushima does Big Air and has done halfpipe as well, but slopestyle – in which athletes make their way down a course over and along various obstacles – is her favourite.
The focus has been on consistency and putting down solid runs.
Snowboarders get two runs in qualifying. The usual approach is to try and land a tidy first run to get on the board, then press harder in the second, aim to be more expansive in the trick repertoire to boost the points up and make the final.
“It’s a bit of everything - rails, jumps and sometimes the quarter pipe. You are not restricted to jumps and you have to work for all of them to be good,” Wakushima says.
Since qualifying for the world circuit, she’s had the odd pinch herself moment, such as lining up alongside some of her idols – “I could name about 10” —and was on hand when 2018 Olympic Big Air bronze medallist Sadowski-Synnott made another bit of snowboard history in Aspen on March 12.
Two New Zealanders in the top eight: you don’t see that every day in the world of winter sports.
“This has been a pretty big step up to what Cool’s been doing previously,” Brown says.
“She’s made that commitment to come and have a crack on the world tour with the best athletes in freestyle snowboard. A lot of the athletes she’s competing against are very experienced and to come away and make two finals is quite an achievement.”
He has high praise for what might be called her general work ethic.
“She’s got lots of potential, is very hard working, super coachable and a great person to be around. She is quite petite but don’t let that fool you. She’s tough as nails,” Brown says.
He also likes the fact that, as an intelligent young woman, “she’s very mature and understands everything that’s going on. She’ll challenge you, and that makes you think as a coach.”
Time was when snowboarding was more regarded as being at the fun end of the snow sports world, with their own language and the athletes not necessarily as dedicated as they could be – or as Brown bluntly put it “being out [on the slopes] with your mates all day long, then a few beers”.
Not anymore, according to Brown, who with his sister Kendall represented New Zealand at both the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics.
Snowboarding has gone from “a ratbag sport, to a high end, high performance, elite sport,” he says. “With the progression of snowboarding, athletes need to prepare. So there’s gym training, good nutrition, mental skills training.
“If you want to be the best you have to train like you are the best. Get all those one percenters in line, and if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.”
Wakushima gets on well with the “pretty amazing” Sadowski-Synnott. And she wants to put her “name out there”.
The final word goes to an admiring Brown: “She’s a switched-on athlete and hungry to get after it and be the best she can be. Her future is very bright.”
