You've heard all about Jenny Jones, and thought maybe she was the only snowboarder coming out of England to make it big. But to hear an English snowboarder tell it, the next big thing to come out of the tiny country with no mountains and very little snow will be Jamie Nicholls.Nicholls, age 17, may have learned to ride on dry slopes and indoor artificial snow, but his talent puts him among the best in the world on any surface.
Since the 1960s, Britons have been skiing and riding on dry slopes made of Dendix, which are hollow hexagons made of upturned brush bristles. In the 1990s, Briton Engineering Developments created Snowflex, a polymer composite system that uses a smooth plastic surface and water to mimic a real snow slope.
"It's a bit like riding on ice, which sounds bad," Nicholls says. "There are small plastic bristles; you can't really dig your edge into it. It's not as grippy as snow but you can still do small tricks."
The Snowflex technology came of age around the same time that Nicholls, age seven, asked his parents for his first snowboarding lesson. A few lessons quickly grew into an obsession.
"Straightaway I was jumping the little jumps," Nicholls remembers. "I knew it was what I wanted to do."
Nicholls's first taste of snow came at age eight on a family vacation to Kitzbuhl, Austria. He hasn't looked back since, and it wasn't long before brands started noticing him. He joined the Salomon team when he was eight, and the Nike 6.0 footwear team two years later.
Salomon/Jools SmithWell you wouldn't expect someone to come to Winter X slope without a double cork in his bag of tricks, would you?"Jamie was the first kid to come from learning to snowboard on [Snowflex] and his talent was way above the generation that came before him," says Nike 6.0 team manager Jonathan Weaver. "Even at the age of 11 he was doing 360s and you could see he had a talent already. All the brands that were selling product in the UK obviously wanted to be associated with the most successful up and comer."
He's so consistent," says Ben Kilner, a 2010 Olympian in the halfpipe for the UK. "We need people like Jamie. As long as we have kids like him coming through, the sport is doing well and it's showing that snowboarding is becoming more popular in Britain."
Is the pressure too much for the teenager? "I never really take it too seriously," Nicholls says. "I can only ride a comp well if I'm relaxed and having fun. That's how I seem to do okay."
Off the snow, Nicholls is like any other 17-year-old British guy: A fan of pop star Cheryl Cole and avid surfer of YouTube videos. He even gets homesick for the home slopes when he's away.
"I still love riding indoors. There's a good crew of us at home, and it's really good fun," he says. "I miss it when I'm away."
"I'd say he's probably in the top five in Europe at the moment of riders his age coming through," Weaver says. "He's very nicely placed in the next generation of riders to make an impact on a global scale."
The next wave is coming: Nicholls said that his younger sister and a 13-year-old cousin both ride for Roxy, and his cousin can do 720s. This will be Nicholls' first Winter X appearance.
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