J.J. Richardson
Primary Outdoor Sports: Skiing & Mountain Biking
Favorite Beverage: Bubbly Water
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Non-Outdoor Hobby: RC
Go-To Trail Snack: Clif Bar
Favorite Season: Fall
Guilty Pleasure: Snowboarding
Fun Fact: I’m an Aircraft Mechanic
Three Words to Describe You: Happy, Energetic, & Quiet
“Outdoor sports have always been in my life. My family was really into skiing when I was a kid. I just hooked on it, like never stopped. Probably won’t ever stop. You know? My parents couldn’t really afford to get me into teams when I was really young, but what they did was both my parents volunteered at this little ski resort called Sky Tavern in Tahoe. That got me in the little ski program so I got to rip around. After that, I did ski teams throughout school, mogul team, and then I started freeriding and competing in that. That’s been my whole life really.”
“I’m pretty old, so they didn’t have freeride comps when I was a kid. When I got out of high school, I couldn’t afford a season pass. I was living in Sun Valley Idaho, I moved back to Reno. I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go back to my home mountain, Mt. Rose, and get a fricken job and get a free pass. It’ll be sick.’ So I did. Ended up working adult ski school for five seasons. It was fun. It was a really easy job. Then I moved away for a year. My buddy calls me up and was like, ‘Hey man, we're starting a freestyle team at Mt Rose. You should come back here and work.’ I ended up moving back eventually, got on with them.
After a few years of that, we found out about this freeride comp thing that was happening in Tahoe. It’s called the Tahoe Junior Freeride Series. Basically all the Tahoe mountains, all their teams compete to see which one is the best. We’re like, ‘We have amazing freeride terrain and our athletes are really good skiers. We should be in this. Why aren’t we involved with this?’ So we got involved. They were like, ‘Dude, we didn’t even know you had a team’
The first few years were pretty hard. The kids were learning the rope of the freeride stuff, but by year three we started having kids podiuming and I was just hooked. I was like, ‘This is the coolest sport ever. This is amazing.’ Especially the vibe at the bottom of the venue, music going, everybody stoked and cheering. There's something about it. You know? So that’s what led me to it. I coached it before I competed. Then after a few years of coaching the kids, I started competing myself. I’m sure when I stop competing I’m going to go back to coaching. Coaching is almost as fun. It’s just being around the sport for me, doesn’t matter what I’m doing.”
“I think one of the coolest moments I remember was when I landed my first backflip. It was crazy because I had never tried it before on skis. This is so irresponsible, but I was coaching all these athletes and I was like, ‘I’m just going to send it.’ I did it and I landed it perfectly. I was like, ‘What in the world just happened.’ Everyone was excited and it blew my mind.
I don’t know why, but sometimes when I do stuff like that, I do better when there's a bunch of people around. All my athletes and their parents were all standing there. So I was just like, ‘I’m doing it.’ It was a mid-sized park jump. I’m like, ‘It's the perfect size. I'm just going to do it and if I crash everyones there and they can help me.’
I had it in the foam pit really well at Woodward so I was pretty confident. You know? I just did it and was like, ‘Oh, that was easy.’ I realized that it was just a mental thing really, just going for it sometimes works.”
“One of my favorite trips was in South America when I got my Avy 1. The instructor was rad. He took our group and realized, ‘Oh, these guys like to freeride,’ So he took us into really sick stuff. That was a highlight. Being out there all fresh, just South America monstrous fricking Andes Mountains.
There were some hairy ridges that we had to take, one pack at a time. It was pretty cool. A lot of hiking. When we were out there the snow was so styrofoaming and just perfect for freeride. The second we got over the ridge and looked down, we were all just like, ‘Holy shit. This is amazing.’ We dropped in one at a time of course. You could hear people screaming from the top to the bottom because the snow was so good. It was amazing. There was all these different lines that you could take and the instructor was sorting out the group like, ‘You guys go this way. Ok, J.J. you can go send that. He kept putting me in the gnar and it was awesome. We all had a celebration for a minute at the bottom and then did it again.”
“When there’s something going on that’s emotionally hard, like at work or someone passed away or whatever, I’ve always been able to take that to whatever sport, whether I’m downhill mountain biking at the time or skiing, I can just harness all that negative shit and just ski it out. Just be. And, I think it makes you a better rider too, because you put all that aggression into something. Then all of a sudden you realize, ‘Holy shit. I ripped the fuck out of that.’ And then you feel better.”
“I crash like every three comps. I probably need to play it safe more. I’m more prone to stomping my line if the conditions are really bad and dangerous. If the conditions are really good, I don’t really care, because I can take a pretty big fall. If I fall and land in a big, wide-open field, it’s like ‘Whatever.’ But, if I fall over a double stagger cliff or something or it’s icy and you can't stop, then I'm probably going to take it a little less big. That way there’s less of a chance for a fall. That’s kinda how I sort that out. It's probably not the most strategic, because I really should try to land every run. But on the good condition days, if I do stomp the really big line, I’ll do a lot better.
You have to crash to progress. My buddy was learning how to drift his car and the guy that was teaching him was like, ‘Man, you’re never going to get good at this until you crash your car.’ He was like, ‘What dude? Are you kidding me?’ He’s like, ‘You have to know how to crash. You have to learn how to do it. You have to not be scared of it. Then, you can progress.’ I know it’s probably not good to try to progress at the comps, but that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“The comps, they’re just so gnarly. The terrain is just insane and the lines that we pick, there’s big consequences. So you step to a line like that and you get to the top and you’re like, ‘Ok, I’m going.’ You’re not skiing up, looking over the edge, You’re going for it. You come back and you go to work and your boss is pissed off and you’re just like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about that.’ There’s nothing you can do to stress me out right now because I was just stressing out pretty hard for two days.”
“Things are starting to open up for me in the industry and I feel like I’m progressing really fast. I just want to see how far it’s going to take me. Eventually, I’m gonna have to chill out on the skiing super hard, gnarly, technical lines because I’ve got old injuries that bother me. But for now, I just want to see how far I can take it in the next few years. You know? If I have to sacrifice some things, that’s just part of it. Some people don’t understand that and some people get really upset. They’re like, ‘Why does he get to get into that comp and I didn’t get into that comp?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, he trained all summer in the gym and is spending every waking moment on his skis.’ That’s a big difference.”
“The environment has a huge role in it. I think that when you do something that’s incredible, you push your limits all the way and you’re successful and the objective that you’re trying to do you did, where you did that is special now. Right? The beauty of all the nature around you is going to make that amplified. It's almost like church. You just had this special moment in a very special place and every time you even see that mountain from a distance, you’re going to think of that or have that feeling. So I think it’s like a connection, you know? It’s pretty rad. I find that I’ve had that a lot here at Mt. Bachelor. I don’t know if it’s the energy from the volcano or what, but I’ve had some epic moments. I’ve progressed to the point that I just never thought I could. Just realizing where I was at and how beautiful the volcano is is insane.”
