Joss Christensen stood on the other side of the world and faced the question with which so many champion athletes struggle. When is the right time to move on?
Christensen, the surprise and storybook gold medalist in the first Olympic men’s ski slopestyle event in 2014, decided to step away from competing while in New Zealand at the beginning of last season.
“Between injuries and maybe not having as much excitement and love for the competition side of the sport, I felt like, before I ruined skiing completely for myself, before I started to hate it, I wanted to move on,” he said this week, “and expand into other areas of skiing that I think we all kind of dream of when we’re growing up.