The Olympic snowboarder Chris Corning is a dutiful conformist in a sport renowned for its proud legacy of nonconformity.
While many snowboarders pump themselves up before a competitive run with loud music, whoops or self-motivating shrieks, Corning prefers quiet.
“I’m a big fan of competing with no emotion,” said Corning, an American who will compete in the big air event at the Beijing Games starting Monday after placing sixth in slopestyle. “People like to get over excited. I’m not very good at that.”
Corning, who narrowly missed winning a medal at the Winter Olympics in 2018, when he finished fourth in the big air competition, spends hours studying film of his tricks with the discipline of a N.F.L. quarterback preparing for the Super Bowl. He eschews the unbridled spirit of creativity in favor of practiced calculation.
“I definitely never go out there and wing it,” said Corning, 22. “That’s dangerous.”
He keeps a busy training schedule for one reason: “Stronger means you fall less often. And I don’t like falling.”
Corning is also convinced snowboarding has an image problem and that he knows how to fix it.
“People think the sport is basically pothead snowboarders, and if snowboarding wants to grow and become more of a professional sport it needs to change,” Corning said late last year as he sat in a coffee shop near his home in Avon, Colo. He added: “I’ve known how the sport is perceived since I was 7 years old and watched snowboarding videos where you’d see guys smoking weed and drinking and fighting. I never cared for that.”
Corning insists the growth and prosperity of his sport will be tied to revamping its ethos, whether that is real or imagined. Since he was 19, Corning has been the appointed liaison for pro snowboarders to the upper management of U.S. Ski and Snowboard, the sport’s national governing body.
“Parents don’t want their kids to go in the terrain park and be around people who are smoking and drinking all the time,” he said. “But that’s what they expect. And go to a normal park, no doubt you’re going to smell weed. Snowboarding is awesome and I do have fun. But I don’t get caught up in the lifestyle of snowboarding. We’d attract more people overall, get more sponsor donations and evolve into something bigger if we focus on the sport and not the lifestyle.”
While Corning was growing up in the Denver area, his athletic future seemed better suited to football than snowboarding. He was a dominant all-purpose player in youth football.
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“We used to joke that Chris kicks the ball, Chris throws the ball, Chris catches the ball, he runs the ball,” said Laura Corning, Chris’s mother. Chris, whose paternal grandfather played college football, recalled that in some games he’d score every point for his team. But Chris’s parents were also recreational snowboarders, and after football season the family would regularly make four trips a week to the mountain resorts west of Denver. Chris began entering local snowboarding competitions.
By the time he was a young teen, his snowboarding events were overlapping with late-season football games, and eventually, Chris chose snowboarding over football. But in the sport’s developmental pipeline — where most of the top athletes belonged to elite teams staffed with professional coaches aligned with major mountain resorts — Chris was an unknown.
“We had just been flying by the seat of our pants,” said Brook Corning, Chris’s father. “But Chris takes things seriously. One day, he told us he wanted to make the U.S. snowboarding team.”
The Cornings — Laura is a court reporter and Brook worked in HVAC construction — sold their home in the Denver suburbs and moved to Summit County, Colo., which put Chris closer to prominent ski areas like Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Keystone. When he was 15, Chris moved to Aspen, where he could get more personalized, private coaching, although it meant living with a host family 130 miles from home.
“I didn’t have a car so I had to take the bus everywhere,” Corning said. “I was doing school online, going to the grocery store, I learned to cook and trained an awful lot.”
Throughout snow sports, it is common for promising teens to be whisked to mountain environments or resort-based academies in pursuit of Olympic glory. But being separated for most of the year from the typical familial setting and supervision at such a young age frequently leads to off-the-snow behavioral issues that can derail careers, and sometimes lives.
Corning, who graduated from high school two years early, shook his head when asked if he experienced anything along those lines.
“I mean, it wasn’t easy and I missed being home but I didn’t hang out much — I don’t party all the time,” he said. “So I never really had any opportunity to do anything to get in trouble. Plus, I remember my dad telling me that before I chose to do anything when I was on my own, I should ask myself, ‘Is this going to be good for my snowboarding?’ So I went home a lot and got ready for the next day.”
Nonetheless, Corning remained lightly regarded as a prospect. “Totally flying under the radar for a long time,” he said.
But, slowly moving up the rankings, he qualified to travel to a World Cup competition in New Zealand. He was 15 and was surprised when he won the event. “That was the first time I thought, ‘I might just make it; it’s not just a kid’s dream,’” he said.
Two years later, Corning won two medals at the 2017 freestyle ski and snowboard world championships and was elevated to the U.S. snowboarding team just before the 2018 Winter Games.
Competing as an 18-year-old in Pyeongchang, South Korea, he was both pleased and disappointed by his fourth-place finish.
“The Olympics were a cool experience but I definitely wanted to do better,” Corning said. “It stays with you and you wonder what to do differently next time.”
Slopestyle and big air are both scored by judges, a situation that can vex competitors trying to guess which tricks will be valued most favorably. There is also the heavy cost of a single mistake.
“It isn’t basketball,” Corning said with a smile, “where if you miss an early free throw you have two hours to make up for it. We have to be pretty much perfect to win any medal.”
And then there is the ever-present fear felt by big air competitors as they stand atop a 50-meter ramp preparing to be flung skyward for multiple flips and twists. Corning, who is 5-foot-8 and 165 pounds, was the first snowboarder to land a quad cork (four inversions and five rotations) at a World Cup event and the first to do it on a scaffold big air jump in 2019. Those successes, however, do not necessarily guarantee a sense of comfort in the seconds before he launches down a steep ramp for a jump.
“The fear is insanely hot and anybody who says they don’t feel it is lying,” Corning said. “A quadruple is terrifying. When it comes time to do one, you’ve got to be in the right head space to try it. You have to stay strong mentally; you’re doing something that could kill you.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Corning expects to resume his pursuit of a sports psychology degree after the Beijing Olympics. He also plans to enroll in a Colorado firefighters’ academy.
But Corning does not expect his commitment to snowboarding to wane. Nor does he shy away from his role as an advocate for the sport’s brighter future.
“I want to give back and see snowboarding in the limelight it deserves,” he said. “I’ve been riding a long time and I think the sport is ready for that next step. It doesn’t have to stay where it is. We can change that.”
