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Outside magazine, February 1999
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Adjustment in Midflight
The legend says Terje Haakonsen, snowboarding's five-time world champion, can win at will

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

Terje Haakonsen
Terje Haakonsen (Frank W. Ockenfels)
To know Terje Haakonsen today, it's best to have known him some yesterdays ago, during a flatline month in Mililani, at the steamy, landlocked heart of Oahu. Psychologically, Haakonsen, the best snowboarder in the world, was as far from the nearby North Shore breaks as he would have been if he were in, say, his native Åmot, Norway, or even some scrubby piece of Middle American suburbia; Mililani, a Levittown transposed and down-marketed to Hawaii, has all the tropical splendor of Omaha, Nebraska. Of course, Haakonsen was already famous by that late fall of 1996. He could have gone somewhere, bought a ticket, boarded a plane, headed for some globally renowned dope spot where they would have welcomed a world champion snowboarder. But a kind of inertia, a torpid inability to get up and go, had struck him. Haakonsen sat on that gray sofa, staring at those blank white walls and watching that 27-inch television, which didn't even have cable, and once in a while thought to himself, What the hell am I doing here? "I couldn't motivate myself, because my mind was stuck there, you know?" Haakonsen says. "I was, like, living underwater, like life was happening around me and I couldn't do anything to change what was going on."

Guys do strange things for girls. And the reason Haakonsen was frozen was that his girlfriend—a native Hawaiian with a cheery face, curly black hair, and a professional surfer's hard body, whose name we won't mention but whom Haakonsen was obviously stuck on—was here. So most of that sultry, sticky fall, while bright green geckos the length of his hand ran across the concrete back porch and the lawn
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turned a rusty brown, Haakonsen sat and stewed and felt like he was waiting for something to happen—like one day things would be different from all the other days and then he would know what it all meant. And that day, as it turned out, came.

Today, right now, Haakonsen is stuck again, pinned momentarily in the status quo, in a space where he has more to lose than to gain from any change in his professional circumstances. He's generally acknowledged to be the best in the world in his sport—indeed, he's spoken of as the best snowboarder ever. He can win premier events seemingly at will. Just 24 years old, Haakonsen is the two-time winner of the world championships, three-time U.S. Open half-pipe champion, three-time Mount Baker Legendary Banked Slalom champion, three-time world half-pipe champion, and so on. He rakes in a fortune in sponsorship money, attracts tittering autograph hounds, alters the landscape of a competition through his presence and especially his absence—from, for example, the Nagano Olympics, which he noisily shunned. In short, he's snowboarding's megastar, and though a generally genial, likable sort, Haakonsen also can project attitude enough to remind the world that he is, after all, the one and only Terje.

But lately, by his own admission, Haakonsen has been doing all this without quite the level of joie he displayed in years past. The rock-star attitude remains—he's famous for blowing off appointments with sponsors and media—but mostly gone are the aggressive, sick-trick routines on which he built his reputation, replaced by maneuvers that are efficient, point-earning ... safe. "I'm, like, not taking as many chances," Haakonsen says. He has shaggy, dirty-blond hair, a thick mogul of cartilage for a nose above thin, expressionless lips. "I've gotten more routine, especially on the pipe. I'm doing the same tricks over and over again. I'm not sure why this is happening." Well, for one, why go bigger than you have to if there is $100,000 at stake for landing your tricks cleanly?

"Can you blame the guy?" says pro snowboarder Peter Line. "I mean, everybody knows that Terje's the best in the world. Why shouldn't he just go for the money?"

With Haakonsen, the point is no longer merely to win. Ever since 1992, when he took the half-pipe title in both the U.S. Open and the World Cup, he's established that going big was simply something he did. "He's got phenomenal athleticism and creativity combined with balls," says Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards and one of Haakonsen's sponsors. "And his moves are usually the biggest, usually the most technically difficult, and the cleanest. His influence has been immense. Before Haakonsen, people never dreamed you could go that high."

But the equation of competition is subtly changed these days. As a legend, Haakonsen is expected to decimate the field; anything less jeopardizes his status. So these are his choices: He can apply his full skills and humble his rivals, as he did while winning the rep-building Mount Baker slalom three of the past four years. (He ran one qualifying heat fakey, or backward, an act described by Sports Illustrated as being "roughly the equivalent of Steve Young's throwing three touchdown passes lefty and then, out of boredom, heaving a fourth right-handed.") Or he can phone in a performance and collect his prize money with a wink. Or he can guarantee his stature by refusing to risk it: Last season, partly because of a lingering hip injury but also due to a sort of competitive ennui, Haakonsen competed in only five World Cup events.


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KARL TARO GREENFELD is the author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation (HarperCollins). This is his first article for Outside.

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