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29th Feb 2012

Five of the best snowboarders the world has ever seen

EA Sports releases the newest instalment of the popular snowboarding game SSX on Friday, so to mark the occasion here’s five of the best snowboarders of all time.

Oisin Collins

EA Sports releases the newest instalment of the popular snowboarding game SSX on Friday, so to mark the occasion here’s five of the best snowboarders of all time.

Shaun White

Shaun White is easily the best-known face in the sport of snowboarding. The 25-year-old Irish-American (had to get that in somewhere) has been on the professional scene since he was 17 and since then there’s been no stopping him.

White has a snow peaked mountain of gold medals for snowboarding including gold in the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics for the halfpipe discipline. Many will argue that he’s not the best in the world, but he’s definitely the best known.

Travis Rice

When you think of EA Sports SSX you think of vast open spaces where you can unleash some of the craziest tricks going. This is what Travis Rice does on a daily basis. The 30-year-old has featured in more than twenty snowboarding films, mainly because of his insanely huge tricks. Rice’s biggest claim to fame was when he arrived at Snowboarder magazine’s Superpark contest at Mammoth Mountain and launched a ‘mammoth’ of a backside rodeo across a 117-foot gap jump. He entered the comp as a nobody and left as a star.

Gretchen Bleiler

Snowboarding sees a lot of talented women taking part in the sport… some very talented women. One of them is Gretchen Bleiler. The 30-year-old from Ohio has won a total of four gold medals at the X Games Championships in Aspen. Many tipped Bleiler to win the gold medal at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010; however, she fell in both of her runs and let the medal slip out of her hands. Still, she’s one of the best female riders in the sport.

Now that’s what you call a pair of legs

Terje Haakonsen

Terje Håkonsen, also spelled “Haakonsen” for us English speaking folk, was one of the most prolific riders of the sport during the nineties. He ‘dominated’ freestyle snowboarding winning the likes of the ISF World Championships three times in a row. He also holds a rake of European and US championship titles. Haakonsen is the creator of an aerial snowboard manoeuvre named ‘The Haakon Flip’, which looks a little something like this:

Danny Kass

Daniel ‘Danny’ Kass is one of the best halfpipe riders that the sport has ever seen. Danny has two Olympic silver medals to his name, which he received while competing at the 2002 Salt Lake City and the 2006 Torino Games. Danny also holds four US Open Championships, seven Winter X Games medals and, as mentioned, two Olympic silver medals. So there’s no denying that he’s pretty damn good at what he does.

SSX from EA Sports is released in Ireland this Friday, March 2. Find out more over here.

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