If you ask me, this week’s guest Axel Pauporté is one of the most influential snowboarders of the 1990s and 2000s.
Even if you don’t know his name, you’re living in a snowboarding culture that he helped shape. Especially if you’re a European snowboarder.
To qualify this rather bold claim, it helps to remember how singular an outlier Axel truly was.
Back in the early 90s, professional snowboarders from mainland Europe were a genuine rarity. Professional snowboarders from flat Northern European countries such as the Netherlands, the UK or Belgium, where Axel was brought up? Legitimate trailblazing pioneers.
All of which makes Axel’s career path especially legendary. Here was a rider who started snowboarding late - and on dry slope to boot. And who, by the end of a storied twenty-year career, was universally regarded as one of snowboarding’s greatest ever freeriders, and had demonstrated that European riders could lead the way in a proving ground like Alaska alongside peers such as Travis Rice, Jonaven Moore and Jeremy Jones.
And the story of how Axel made this happen is as unlikely as it is instructive. This really isn’t your standard pro snowboarder origin story.
Here we have an outsider, both literally and figuratively, who was driven by a potent emotional combination: his own insecurities, a Stakhanovite work ethic, and a ferocious desire to use snowboarding a way of finding a sense of belonging.
In Axel’s case, that ultimately led him to AK, and the pursuit of risks that today make him pause and wonder, as we discussed.
As you might be gathering, this is a very honest conversation that covers belonging, identity, and the psychology and selfishness of risk; as well as the reckoning that comes to us all once the body and mind begins to fade, and other priorities take precedence.
Big thanks to Axel and my friend Dave Mailman for the help with this one.
