Grace
Warner
United States
·
Snowboarding
Date of birth | October 6, 2000 |
|---|---|
Birthplace | Pontiac, Michigan, USA |
Age | 25 |
Nationality | United States |
Career start | 2018 |
Discipline | Snowboard Street |
Snowboarder Grace Warner loves her sport and is happiest when she’s strapped into her board. She started at age 4 at Michigan’s Alpine Valley.
Grace and her siblings would get dropped off on the slopes after school all winter, and she learned to snowboard with help from her dad and the community around her.
“The kids, as a community, took it into our own hands to help build something,” Grace says. Though she loved the sport, she never thought pursuing a career in professional snowboarding would be possible. “That seemed like a fairytale I’d never be able to achieve,” she says.
Eventually, the invites came for her to compete in rail jams, where she was often one of just a handful of girls competing. “It never felt competitive,” she says. “I was just snowboarding with friends.” In 2021, Grace competed in her first Dew Tour contest at Copper, earning a silver medal in the streetstyle discipline, and in 2022, she took second place at Red Bull Rail Yard 2.0, a snowboard rail jam in North Carolina. “I wasn’t worried about winning or landing on the podium,” Grace says. “I just want to show the way I ride my snowboard.”
Inspired by watching street snowboarding videos, Grace fine-tuned her own craft. Her brother would capture her tricks on camera, and she’d analyze her technique and style to figure out what she wanted to do differently. “I became obsessed with taking notes on what I wanted to look differently or how I could do it better,” she says.
She blasted onto the scene in 2021, at the age of 20, with a part in the video, “Corrupt,” shot entirely on the streets of Michigan. Her attention-getting segment in the film, “No Pressure,” came out in late 2022, and she had a noteworthy part in 2023’s “Hot Coco,” an all-women streetstyle film shot in Finland that was picked up by Red Bull TV and won Slush Mag’s Short Film of the Year award.
Turns out, some fairytales do come true. “It’s just so surreal what my life is like now,” Grace says. “I owe it all to the entire Detroit snowboard scene – they’ve made me feel included and supported and motivated me so much.”