Olympic pressure doesn’t affect only the athletes; it impacts resorts, too. Just ask Mammoth Mountain, California’s Unbound terrain park director, TJ Dawoud. As the man in charge, it falls on Dawoud to make sure that everything on the snow is ready when the ski area hosts events. In a normal year it’s a tough job, but pile snowpack levels measuring a dismal 20 percent of normal on top of the critical final three Olympic snowboarding qualifying events and it suddenly goes from challenging to beyond reason.
Unexpectedly, due to poor weather in Breckenridge, Colorado, and, previously, challenging snow conditions in Lake Tahoe, California, Mammoth Mountain found itself hosting the last three of five Olympic qualifying snowboard halfpipe and slopestyle events … More