Snowboarding

How to go pro (when you’re Jenny Jones)

“My ballet teacher told my mum I was too ‘elephant-like’…!”
By Jason Horton
4 min readPublished on
Jenny Jones

Jenny Jones

© Jason Horton

If you’ve ever seen the movie ‘ Chalet Girl’, you already know some of Jenny Jones’s life story – this Olympic Slopestyle medallist was the original Chalet Girl who, aged 18, moved out to the French Alps for a winter’s work… and came home the British champion.
Today, Jenny is one of the top riders in the world, with three X Games gold medals to go alongside her Sochi bronze. So, to learn a little more about what it takes for a girl from Bristol, England to become a world champion, we dug a little deeper into Jenny’s past…
Big Brothers
My brothers were really pleased to have a little sister to play with, and so I was included in everything, spending most of my first two years tucked up in the trailer of the boys’ tractor, carted around the back garden, in and out the wigwam. That basically set the pattern of me following in their footsteps, always trying to keep up with my elder bros.
Ed Sweet was my first kiss. He made me fall off my bike, then he kissed me (with tongues) and I got a billion butterflies in my stomach.
No Time for Love
Ed Sweet was my first kiss. He made me fall off my bike, then he kissed me (with tongues) and I got a billion butterflies in my stomach. Other than that I didn’t do much with lads because I was doing so much sport. Gym club, athletics, piano class, swim club… my schedule was way too busy for boys.
Jenny Jones

Jenny Jones

© Vernon Deck

Gymnastics
I started gym when I was about five. Apparently my ballet teacher told my mum I was a little too “elephant-like”, so I went to gym instead, and loved it. At around 10 years old they wanted me to train a lot more. It got all serious, with diet stuff and tablets, so my parents moved me to a mellow gym which was a right laugh. I went there until 16-ish, then moved into athletics.
Earn Your Turns
The first time I ever tried snowboarding was with my brothers at a dryslope near Bristol, where we had a free half-hour lesson. But it wasn’t until my first trip to the Alps at 18 that I really got to grips with it, and then I absolutely loved it; it was so fast and kinda out of control. That was it. I saved some cash and went to Tignes for my first season, where I got a job working in a ski chalet.
That winter, I went snowboarding every day on my Smelly Tuna Fish board (pretty cool, huh?) and I would get back to the chalet knackered, then have to clean, serve dinner, clean up and socialise with my guests. It was hard, but totally worth it.
Learn a big trick
The first trick I learned was a method, and soon after that I learned backflips. But they weren’t the cool Wildcat looking ones; this was a fully stretched out backflip – how the hell I landed it I will never know. That spring, I went to the British Championships and won the Big Air event with a backflip.
But, I stopped doing them soon after because people had been saying stuff like, “She only does backflips because she’s a gymnast. She can’t do real tricks.” So from then on, I didn’t want to rely on them to win contests. I didn’t do them for years after that, and the next time I tried to do them, I couldn’t land them anymore. Gutted!
This week, we have tons of advice for you on how to become a pro - check out the articles from the Burton and Roxy team managers above.
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