Alyssa RoenigkFeb 4, 2026, 08:07 AM ETCloseAlyssa Roenigk is a senior writer for ESPN whose assignments have taken her to six continents and caused her to commit countless acts of recklessness. (Follow @alyroe on Twitter).Follow on XMultiple Authors
play1:58From slopestyle star to halfpipe contender: Nick Goepper’s next chapterNick Goepper says retiring never really felt right — he just needed something new. Switching to halfpipe gave him that spark, and once he started landing big tricks and winning, he knew he belonged.
play2:40Why Gus Kenworthy chose to come backGus Kenworthy reflects on why he returned to halfpipe skiing after retiring in 2022 — and why he made a deliberate choice to put himself back on the line and compete entirely for himself.
From slopestyle star to halfpipe contender: Nick Goepper’s next chapterNick Goepper says retiring never really felt right — he just needed something new. Switching to halfpipe gave him that spark, and once he started landing big tricks and winning, he knew he belonged.
Nick Goepper says retiring never really felt right — he just needed something new. Switching to halfpipe gave him that spark, and once he started landing big tricks and winning, he knew he belonged.
Why Gus Kenworthy chose to come backGus Kenworthy reflects on why he returned to halfpipe skiing after retiring in 2022 — and why he made a deliberate choice to put himself back on the line and compete entirely for himself.
Gus Kenworthy reflects on why he returned to halfpipe skiing after retiring in 2022 — and why he made a deliberate choice to put himself back on the line and compete entirely for himself.
GUS KENWORTHY DIDN’T know if he would ever say it out loud. Three years after retiring from professional skiing and less than a year ahead of the 2026 Olympics, a radical thought tugged at his mind: At 34, he wanted one more shot at competing on his sport’s biggest stage.
The three-time Olympian had already walked away once. And in the years since the 2022 Beijing Games, he had curated an enviable life working as an actor, model and LGBTQ+ advocate. He traveled the world and was a popular fixture on red carpets and at glitzy Hollywood parties. He didn’t need skiing. But he started to feel like an imposter in his own life.
“I’d be at a party, and someone would ask, ‘What do you do now?'” Kenworthy says. “And I wouldn’t know how to answer. Saying anything other than, ‘I’m a professional skier,’ felt wrong coming out of my mouth. I felt a loss of my sense of identity.”
But he was scared. What if his body failed him? What would his competitors, many of whom were nearly half his age, think? What if his life didn’t wait for him?
Then he saw Lindsey Vonn return to the podium of a World Cup race in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March 2025, five months after her 40th birthday and six months after she returned to skiing from a six-year retirement, and he saw what could happen if he pushed beyond his fears.
“Anything’s easier when you watch someone else do it,” Kenworthy says. “I know that Lindsey would’ve had to go through all the same thoughts and emotions and fears that I went through. And despite all of that, she decided to give it another go. To see her do that and it pay off, and her prove she’s still that girl, I was like, ‘I’m still that girl, too.'”
Like Vonn, Schaffrick and Goepper, Kenworthy knew the risks — failure, injury, criticism — but still he chose to move forward. They all understand that sports have changed, and they’ve changed, too. It might be harder this time around. Recovery might take longer and their joints might be sore. But they’re not the same competitors they were before. In many ways, they’re better.
Lindsey Vonn on the joy and drive behind her comeback
TEN YEARS AGO, Maddy Schaffrick was a plumber’s apprentice in Steamboat Springs, Colo., trying to forget she was once one of the most promising halfpipe snowboarders in the country. A prodigy who had spent seven years competing on the U.S. halfpipe team, she retired in 2015 after a string of knee surgeries. At just 20, she was burned out and disillusioned with the sport.
She had become so anxious during contests that she barely remembers her performances now. At the top of the halfpipe before dropping in for her runs, she would spiral into a pattern of negative self-talk and look for teammates and competitors to dance with to distract her mind and distance herself from the moment.
“I would just dissociate,” Schaffrick says. “I didn’t land a lot of runs those last few years because I felt fear.”
Schaffrick says each generation has made it easier for athletes like her to prioritize their wants and well-being while chasing their dreams. “My parents’ generation, they were told their life path, what was accepted and appropriate and on what timeline,” she says. “That took away their autonomy. Now we’re in an era of believing, ‘I can create the world I live in.'”
In 2022, Schaffrick rejoined U.S. Ski & Snowboard as an assistant coach for the men’s and women’s pro halfpipe teams. She hadn’t followed the sport closely — “It was too painful,” she says — so she was surprised to learn during her first training camps that the women’s program lacked depth. The tricks weren’t progressing as quickly as they had when she was competing. “I was like, ‘There’s space here,'” Schaffrick says.
She had continued to snowboard throughout her retirement and even dropped into halfpipes on occasion. Once a year, she threw a cab 720 — also known as a Haakon flip — just to remind herself she hadn’t become a coach because she couldn’t snowboard herself. “I wasn’t Bela Karolyi just coaching from the sidelines,” she says.
At first, she kept the thought mostly to herself. She loved developing athletes, passing along the kind of wisdom she wished someone had shared with her when she was young. She wasn’t sure she was willing to give that up to pursue a long-forgotten dream, not to mention walk away from her only source of income.
But after spending nearly a decade teaching young athletes how to deal with butterflies on contest day, the pressure of a final run, and the disappointment of receiving an underwhelming score, she realized she now had the tools to handle those moments herself.
After testing the waters at a couple of amateur contests, Schaffrick dropped into her first World Cup contest in Beijing in December 2024. During qualifiers, she found herself falling into old patterns of negative self-talk and anxiety. She looked around at the top of the halfpipe for someone to dance with. But then she stopped. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to think or feel this way anymore,'” she says. She placed her hand on the ground and closed her eyes.
A young athlete she had coached for years, Jesse Hamric, had done the same. Before contests, Hamric would lay on the ground to shift his energy and quiet his mind. When Schaffrick told him in late spring 2024 that she was considering coming out of retirement, he had made her a bracelet with the word, “TRY.” Hamric, 18, died a few months later in an accident. Schaffrick had those three letters tattooed on her right wrist.
Before her second run in Beijing, she pulled back her glove and looked at those letters. “Just try,” she said to herself. She allowed herself to feel everything — the nerves, the fear, the self-doubt and discomfort — took a deep breath and dropped into the halfpipe. She finished third in her first World Cup contest in a decade.
“I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to be the person I’ve always wanted to be,” Schaffrick says.
From slopestyle star to halfpipe contender: Nick Goepper’s next chapter
GOEPPER STOOD AT the top of the 2024 X Games Aspen halfpipe wearing jeans, a red Carhartt hoodie and Kool-Aid red hair beneath a bright red helmet with flames along the sides. He had no sponsors and few expectations. On the back of his helmet, in stick-on letters, he’d written: “THX MOM & DAD.”
“I was a blank slate,” Goepper says. “And I was like, you know what? F— it, I’m gonna be myself, wholeheartedly.”
During his years as a slopestyle competitor, Goepper never felt he could be himself. He had sponsors to satisfy and a fan base to grow. He did his best to fit the cool-guy action sports image he believed people wanted to see. But that took its toll. He became depressed and anxious, drank too much and eventually spent time in rehab. He retired after his third Olympics, in 2022. “I knew I was done competing in slopestyle,” he says.
But his time away from competition started to feel more like a pause than an ending. A three-time Olympic medalist in slopestyle, he saw an opportunity in halfpipe, a discipline in which he had never competed. “To pick a similar discipline and try to master it felt like a fun project for me. And that’s really what I love: mastery.”
Few skiers have excelled in both slopestyle and halfpipe, and those who have, like Kenworthy and Eileen Gu, an American-born skier who competes for China, have done so simultaneously. “But it’s unprecedented to do an entire career, take a year off, and then come back for this second rebirth,” Goepper says while sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck outside Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge. He’s here in July 2025 training in the halfpipe and coaching young campers.
“I had to figure out who I was and what I represented,” he says. “I’m not just somebody with logos all over me. I’m a real person with real values.”
“I’ve always loved ski racing. I wouldn’t have come back as many times as I did if I didn’t love it,” Vonn says. “But I’m enjoying it in a different way. I’ve lived a lot in the last six years. And it gives me a clearer lens to see life through.”
This time, he’ll still be embraced at the bottom of the halfpipe by his family and fans waving rainbow flags, but he knows they will be just as proud if he finishes first or last. The only person he has to make proud this time is himself.
WHEN SCHAFFRICK LEFT her coaching role to return to competition, not everyone was happy for her. Some parents and athletes posted on social media questioning her motives. People accused her of taking opportunities away from their children, of abusing her power as a coach and having an unfair advantage. She was told several people filed complaints with the sport’s governing body, although she never faced discipline.