Summit Lynch has a full schedule this week at the 2024 United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Assocation National Championship at Copper Mountain: The 12-year-old Colorado snowboarder qualified for all six disciplines at the nationals in Summit County.
Lynch participated in the opening ceremonies Saturday and kicked off his six-round campaign Sunday, finishing 17th of 46 in the giant slalom race. He is scheduled to race slalom Monday and boardercross Tuesday before moving on to the freestyle disciplines he’s better known for later in the week: slopestyle, halfpipe and the rail jam.
While he’s aiming for the podium in boardercross and each of the freestyle events, he’s also after the overall points prize for his age division. Lynch competes in the boys 11-12 age bracket, and jokes that he is already 11 years into his snowboarding career.
“I don’t even remember my first time snowboarding — I mean, I was 1 year old — but there’s videos of my dad first getting me into it and every video I’ve seen is of me loving it from the first time I ever did it,” Lynch said. “I’ve wanted to do it all, ever since.”
Like his father, Geoff Lynch, and mother, Mary Kendig, Summit is a snowboarding super fan. He grew up in Nederland and now splits time between his dad’s place there and his mom’s place in Steamboat Springs.
If you’ve ever been to Copper Mountain to watch pro events like the U.S. Grand Prix World Cup or Dew Tour, or to Aspen to see the Winter X Games, you’ve probably spotted Lynch in the fan corral at the bottom of the course, studying every athlete’s every move, cheering wildly, then asking for autographs. Sometimes they pose for selfies with him or hand him their competition bibs as a souvenir.
Lynch hopes to be giving them a run for it in those same contests in a few years, wearing a contestant’s bib and standing on podiums with his idols.
“I first got interested in competing when I was around 7 or 8 years old, because we were going to all the US Open, World Cup, Dew Tour and X Games events in Colorado, and I’d always had a view of the riders competing on the world stage and immediately knew I wanted to do that for myself,” Lynch said. “I think seeing other people do these incredible tricks in person makes it feel more real, like, ‘I could be able to do that someday.’”
There’s one role model whose career Lynch says he most hopes to emulate: Red Gerard, the 2018 Olympic slopestyle gold medalist, two-time Dew Tour slopestyle champion, and 2024 X Games slopestyle gold medalist who also recently competed in the 2024 Natural Selection Tour big mountain snowboarding events and who has won multiple awards for his innovative backcountry video parts.
Gerard, who grew up in Silverthorne, is now teammates with Lynch on the Burton Snowboard team (a new sponsor for Lynch as of December), and has been mentoring the young rider.
“I just love his style of riding,” Lynch said. “I’ve been watching his videos and watching him in contests since I was really little and he’s always been that guy who I’ve wanted to ride like. I think Red’s career shows that if you can do well in everything, you’re a great snowboarder. I want to be more than just a kid who can huck off a jump or spin onto a rail then spin off of a rail, or just go racing through the gates.”
Gerard won the Olympic slopestyle gold medal when he was 17 at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games in Korea. Lynch (who will be one year shy of the 15-year-old age minimum to compete at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games in Italy) says he hopes to follow a similar trajectory when he’s Olympics-eligible at age 18. The locations for the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics will be announced this summer, but the French Alps are in line for 2030 and Salt Lake City for the 2034 Games.
USASA Nationals is the gateway to eventually get points to go to the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, Futures Tour, then the FIS Revolution Tour, then, beginning at age 15, to get points to go to the FIS World Cup stage, which doubles as the Olympics qualifying series.
“To get through to Nationals you have to go through the regional events: your best three scores in each discipline count,” Lynch said. “We were traveling all over the place to get the points to go to Nationals, especially since I was trying for all six disciplines, so I was pretty stoked on qualifying for everything. It was really tough.”
It will even be tougher this week, and Lynch says he’s keeping his expectations in check.
In 2023 he qualified for just two disciplines at Nationals, finishing 10th in slopestyle and 22nd in giant slalom. In the Rocky Mountain Region he competes in, he finished the 2023-24 season ranked first in giant slalom, fourth in halfpipe, fifth in boardercross, sixth in rail jam and slalom, and 11th in slopestyle.
To win any of them this week now that he’s at the top of the age bracket, he’ll have to get through fierce competition including one of his Rocky Mountain Series rivals, an Eagle County local who has been dominating.
“Regionally, there’s one kid, Elijah Stroker, who pretty much wins everything in slopestyle, rail jam and halfpipe,” Lynch said. “He’s my age, so I compete against him every year. I recently beat him for the first time, in a rail jam, and he definitely pushes me to that next level of riding and progression.”
USASA marketing and partnerships director Tricia Byrnes says USASA Nationals pulls the top third of all amateur competitors in the United States, based on points earned at over 500 annual events at 115 different ski resorts across 30 USASA regional series, including three in Colorado: the Rocky Mountain Series Lynch competes in, an Aspen Snowmass Series, and a Southwest Colorado Series.
“Every single athlete that is on the U.S. Freeski and Snowboard Team now or in the past got their start at one of our regional series and came through Nationals, the Futures Tour and the Revolution Tour before going on to the World Cup or Olympic level: that’s the pipeline,” Byrnes said. “So, Shaun White, Chloe Kim, Travis Rice, Jeremy Jones. … For every top U.S. snowboarder you can think of, this is the beginning for all of it.”
Byrnes, who competed in halfpipe as an Olympian at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games and still holds a record 15 World Cup halfpipe wins, is part of that USASA history.
“I went to the first-ever USASA Nationals in 1990 and I won it,” Byrnes said. “Ross Powers, Jana Meyen, Shannon Dunn, Chris Klug … all the people I later went to the Olympics with, we were all out there competing when we were kids. So this event has a long legacy, dating back to even before the Olympics: USASA was creating future Olympians even before snowboarding was allowed in the Olympics.”
As Lynch ponders the impact he might make on that legacy as this week unfolds, he says he knows he’ll have an uphill climb to make the podium or earn points toward the overall prize. He doesn’t have a racing-specific board or boots or a racing suit like many of his slalom and giant slalom competitors, he’s 30 pounds shy of some of his peers in the boardercross field, where weight makes a difference, and the competition is especially stiff in slopestyle and halfpipe.
“My favorites are probably slopestyle and rail jam and boardercross because they’re the most exciting for me and they’re the ones I’m best at,” Lynch said, noting that his boardercross coach is two-time Olympian and two-time world champion Mick Dierdorff.
Lynch credits some of those fundamentals to training with the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, which boasts it has trained 100 Olympians who have brought home 18 medals. His coach Sasha Nations, head coach for the SSWSC Juniors Team, has helped train Gerard, two-time Olympian Chris Corning of Silverthorne, and dozens of other top-tier Colorado snowboarders as they were coming up.
“I just love how Summit shows up to training every day,” Nations said. “He’s super positive, he’s super coachable, he loves snowboarding, and he goes for it.”
She said she sees in a spark in Lynch that she has come to recognize.
“I’ve had a hand in developing quite a few athletes who are now X Games athletes and have gone on to be Olympic athletes, and it’s really fun to work with somebody like Summit at this young age where you can see their stoke, you can see their potential, you can see their dreams,” Nations said.
Her biggest fear for an overachiever like Lynch?
“What I see as my biggest job is making sure that these kids don’t experience burnout, because keeping that same stoke level through training and the whole lifecycle of an athlete is really important: ‘How do we keep them engaged? How do we keep them safe? How do we keep them in sport?’”
She says she sometimes can’t believe how mature Lynch’s approach to snowboarding and competition is.
“I have a good feeling Summit will succeed because he just loves to snowboard, and he wants to do it all, and because his dad is so into snowboarding and he’s helping Summit find that love for it in a healthy way by helping him understand the history of it, in out of contests,” Nations said, “and showing him you can find passion for every part of snowboarding, from riding pow with your mom or dad or your friends to racing or doing slopestyle or halfpipe, or whatever aspect of it you’re into.”
Nations says she loves working with young riders at the junior development level, and sees the USASA contests as a pure-fun stepping stone to the higher-stakes Olympic and pro-level side of snowboarding.
Nations said she sees the 2024 USASA Nationals as a transition year for Lynch, his last year in the U12 age brackets; at 13 he’ll be eligible to compete in the USASA Futures Tour (operated in conjunction with the US Ski & Snowboard team), and then the FIS Revolution Tour, before leveling up to the World Cup tier when he hits 15.
“So he is right on path with where he should be, and has a great opportunity this week to go out and have a lot of fun at this huge event where the vibe is terrific,” Nations said. “This is where it all starts.”
As if the six disciplines Lynch will compete in at Copper Mountain this week aren’t enough, he’s also an accomplished banked slalom racer — he took second at the Slash and Burn Banked Slalom at Steamboat last week — and competes in big mountain freeriding contests on the Rocky Mountain Freeride Tour, part of the International Freeskiers and Snowboarders Association (IFSA) Freeride World Tour Junior Series.
Immediately after USASA Nationals, he will head over to Breckenridge for the 2024 Freeride Junior National Championship, April 7-14, his first time qualifying for the event.
He is trying not to put too much pressure on himself there, either.
“I think the one main thing to remember is that snowboarding is all about going out and having fun,” Lynch said. “It’s not all about competing, but competing and doing well is also a lot of fun. You just have to stay true to the sport, keep it fun, keep it stylish. I have some big events coming up but it’s best not to take any of it too seriously.”