To The Void And Back

On January 7th, 2023, up-and-coming professional skier Cole Richardson collided with a tree while skiing in Japan. The impact eviscerated his liver and pancreas, damaged several other internal organs, shattered his elbow, and left him temporarily unable to lift his arms after he suffered nerve damage to his brachial plexus.

Cole was taken to a hospital in Sapporo, where he spent a month in bed, hooked up to various life support devices. During this initial month, his doctors told him that he likely needed three to eight years to recover from his injuries fully, and skiing, which had been Cole’s north star since he was very young, might be out of the question in the future. Surrounded by the buzz of medical equipment, he wondered who he would be without the sport that’d guided his life thus far.

Those ponderings were decades in the making. Twenty-two years before the crash, Cole was born into a family of ski racers living in Canmore, Alberta. Both his parents competed in the upper echelons of alpine racing, and his sister, Britt, is a current member of the Canadian National Team.

With a laugh, Cole admits that Britt was the “golden child” of the family. However, his parents never scoffed at his pursuit of a freestyle-oriented ski career. “They love what I do,” he explains.

And, while you won’t see Cole on the race course these days, bashing gates was a fundamental part of his come-up, ensuring that he knew how to bend a ski before graduating to backflips and cliff drops.

He spent much of his early years racing and shredding around Lake Louise, Alberta, before pivoting towards competitive big-mountain skiing, a decision that quickly paid off. In 2016, the same year that he’d shifted disciplines, Cole became the IFSA junior champion at age 14, winning North America’s preeminent youth big mountain series.

The title didn’t launch Cole into skiing stardom. Seven years ago, as is still the case today, competitive big-mountain skiing was relatively niche. For a young big mountain competitor to really get eyeballs on their skiing, they either need to wait until they’re old enough to qualify for the Freeride World Tour or start trying to film their own video projects. The problem is ski movie invites require notoriety, and Cole, while talented and a junior champ, was still just another face in the overly crowded pro skier rat race.

After winning the junior championship, Cole left the big mountain scene to further expand his skillset, spending the next winter as a member of the WinSport slopestyle team at the Canadian Olympic Park in Calgary, Alberta. During a conversation with writer Matt Cote for Arc’Teryx, Cole discussed the temporary change of course. “I just thought that there’d be some value in doing a little bit of slopestyle to try to learn some more tricks. So I left big mountain and went full-on into halfpipe and slopestyle for one year,” he said.

When Cole returned to big mountain skiing with an improved arsenal of tricks one year later, he stumbled across Quiksilver Young Guns, a video-focused competition led by legendary ripper Sammy Carlson. Cole initially thought his skiing wasn’t up to snuff, so he didn’t enter the contest, figuring he wouldn’t make it into the finals. But when a friend made the cut later that year, Cole opted to participate the following season, submitting a video that ultimately earned him an invite to the finals in 2019.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cole won the event, earning $10,000 and inching closer to meeting a childhood goal: having a breakout season before he turned 21. With the Young Guns title under his belt, the odds of reaching this milestone appeared ever-favorable. “I think once that happened,” Cole says, describing his Young Guns victory, “a lot of people started tapping in, and I met a lot of cool people after that.”

The rest, you could say, is history. Cole spent a season couch-surfing and skiing as much as possible before purchasing a sled and a truck and heading out west to Whistler, British Columbia, where every significant moment in his life -- growing up under the tutelage of badass racers, winning the IFSA title at 14, taking a season to focus on his freestyle skills, beating out a crowd of talented athletes to claim victory at Young Guns -- coalesced.

His momentum began to produce results. He filmed with Blank Collective. He received an Instagram DM from Scott Gaffney -- the legendary filmmaker behind Matchstick Productions -- asking to see if he wanted to appear in a Matchstick movie. He won the coveted iF3 breakout Skier of the Year award at 20 years old, his debut as a professional skier arriving exactly when he’d hoped.

Then it all came to a halt in Japan with an accident that should’ve been the end of this chapter in Cole’s story. At first, the injuries seemed to be a robbery, one of the many cruel tricks life plays on those who only deserve to reap the benefits of what they’ve sown.

“I've worked on one thing my whole life. I've been motivated my whole life to do just one thing. And then you have doctors telling you it might take eight years [to recover],” Cole says, recounting his experiences in Japan. “I 100% was going through my head like ‘okay, like what, what else am I going to do in life?’”

I’ve never been one to believe in fate. But when I learned via an Instagram post Cole shared earlier this year that he was going heli-skiing -- only three months after his traumatic injury due to a miraculous recovery -- I wondered if the universe does select destinies for a lucky few.

However, after speaking with Cole during a video call interview this summer, I realized that while cosmic chance impacts all our lives, the universe can’t take full credit for his impressive ability to deflect setbacks that might derail another skier’s career.

At 22, Cole possesses clear-mindedness and drive typically reserved for those several years his senior. When we first began speaking, I mistook this confidence for naivete, particularly when I asked him about the stresses of professional skiing. “My whole life, when I was five years old, people asked me what I was going to do, and I told them I was going to do this. So it's not like I didn't see it coming,” he said in response.

Here’s the thing. For most who’ve dreamt that dream, becoming a professional skier is similar to becoming a best-selling author or a player in the NBA. It’s a career that doesn’t usually pay off. Therefore, you hope you’ll become a professional skier, not, like Cole, know you’ll become a professional skier.

That self-assuredness quickly grew on me, though. Cole’s been a planner his entire life, committed to delineating specific, large goals that he can achieve by reaching smaller, bite-sized milestones. I began to understand that this wasn't naivete but a combination of finely tuned awareness and grit -- from a young age, he knew he had the talent to become a professional and believed that his rise was inevitable if he did his homework.

The crash in Japan tested Cole's steeled mindset.

While he described feeling stress and fear after being seriously injured, Cole’s explanations were always undercut by pragmatism, demonstrating that his optimism remained even in a moment of extreme uncertainty. Instead of spiraling, he actively thought about what might come next should professional skiing not work out. In short, he began constructing an alternate life plan to take him toward a new yet unimagined horizon.

“I just removed skiing from my foreseeable future. And I dove into all the other things, all my other interests… I started just figuring out what I would do if I wasn't gonna be a skier. Again, very valuable, meaningful time for me,” he says, illustrating his prevailing attitude during the recovery period.

That conversational tidbit, which provided insight into the internal engine that’s driven Cole’s success thus far, was only a small slice of our discussion. To learn more about his injury takes on professional skiing, style, the rise of TikTok, and everything in between, read on.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Does the potential of your career… Does that ever stress you out, or is that a motivating factor for you?

Cole Richardson: A bit of both, for sure. I think it's overall, it's a motivating factor. It's like, my whole life since when I was five years old, people asked me what I was going to do, and I told them I was going to do this. So it's not like I didn't see it coming.

I guess some stress comes around the idea of wanting to perform the best all the time, and unfortunately, you can't get the best all the time, and stuff like what happened this season happens, and you get injured. And it's just like rolling with it. But I think for me, what's opened it up a lot is just trying to focus on following natural opportunities and opportunities that feel comfortable and not trying to chase things that feel unnatural for me.

I think seeking out those opportunities helps me a lot to just always be motivated and always be stoked because, at the end of the day, I feel like I'm doing the same thing I was doing when I was a grom skiing. I'm just trying to learn tricks, stack clips, and hang out with my friends.

Despite your brief career thus far, you've already had a series of injuries… Have these experiences been discouraging for you at all, given your age, or did you feel like you quickly bounced back and were motivated to keep moving after them?

I think I've been unbelievably blessed with how fast I've bounced back from both of my injuries. This recent one especially. It's been the most miraculous recovery I ever could have imagined, and because of that, it hasn't discouraged me at all. It's almost made me more hungry. Like I understand right off the get go it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. I’m trying to push my skiing, I would like to be the best skier. I would like to have an impact on this industry. And in this sport, if you’re going to do that, I'm going to get injured at some point.

I understood this is going to happen, and it’s a bummer when it does happen, and it definitely has changed my mentality a little bit in the sense that I'm trying to think of risk over reward a little bit more and trying to be a little bit more intentional with the decisions I make. Not doing stuff just to do it. Where in the past, growing up, I've definitely been just doing stuff to do it. Doing doubles in November and just doing stuff to send and show up.

And the past injury, it was the most impactful, valuable time I've ever had in my life because there's a big chunk of time not knowing at all if I was never gonna ski again. I was super close to dying, and I spent a month and a half in the hospital bed in Japan by myself. And it just gave me a lot of time to think about how I want to move forward, and that I'm very grateful for.

I remember reading that Instagram post of yours where the docs were initially saying that it could be three to eight years for the recovery process. Were you shocked that it took such a small amount of time for the recovery?

I just removed skiing from my foreseeable future. And I just dove into all the other things, all my other interests. I really dove into my creativity. I created a bunch of new hobbies, and I got super into drawings and doing art. I was editing a lot of videos, filming videos. I made magazines. I started just figuring out what I would do if I wasn't gonna be a skier. Again, very valuable, meaningful time for me.

I was going through all that figuring out who else I would be without skiing, so to be back skiing again three months later and be this summer -- like I did a dub ten the other day -- to do that six months later was like, every time I landed a trick I'm just like, ‘it's insane I'm doing this right now.’ I shouldn't be doing this right now. I was told that I wasn't going to be doing this right now, and I mentally prepared myself to not be doing this right now. So to be doing it is always a trip. I always catch myself. I was like, ‘Holy shit, like four months ago, I was in a hospital bed or whatever.’

Do you feel like you're 100% now after the injury?

I'm getting there. There's not a single trick that I've ever been able to do in my life that I haven't done yet. This summer, I had some time, and I was able to get all of my tricks back and keep pushing myself to the same level I’ve always been pushing myself.

I lost a lot of weight and a lot of strength in that time in the hospital, especially not eating for the month, so I feel like I still have quite a bit of strength to regain. But aside from that, I think I'm starting to feel 100%. I'd say I'm at like 90 right now, and I'm trying to respect that in what I'm doing in my life right now. Trying to be smart about my decisions and not doing many other sports right now. Kind of just focusing on training, rehab, and skiing.

What is style to you, and what role does it play in your skiing?

Style is everything to me. The role that it plays is that it gives you some individuality. It’s what separates you from another skier. Every single skier has their own style. And a trick is a trick, but style makes it personal. I think that's a good way to say it, style’s personality.

I think that’s all skiers because you look up to certain skiers because of the way they do things. There are a lot of skiers that do the biggest things but don’t get that respect because they don’t do it with that much individuality. But you look at some skiers that really do it where you see them do a 360, and you know that’s like, that skier because that’s how he does his 360.

So your parents were receptive to you taking a different ski path than they did?

It's funny. My sister's definitely -- being the World Cup ski racer -- she's the golden child. But they love what I do. They were down with it for sure. They knew my personality didn’t fit ski racing.

What does being a professional skier mean to you, and then would you consider yourself a professional skier? Or is that still an aspirational goal?

To me, to be a professional anything means it's your profession. It's your main livelihood, your main income; it's your main job. To be a professional skier means you can live off what you’re doing. And I was able to quit my landscaping job, so I'd say right now I'm a professional skier. It’s my only job. I’m putting everything I have into it. So yeah, super grateful.

So, to advance your career as a skier, have you found that it's been more about honing your craft on snow? Or has it been more about networking and selling yourself?

I think it requires a very strong balance of both, and I've learned a lot on both sides… it's a bit of understanding the behind-the-scenes, I think, and that's what I've been learning a lot about my career is that it's not just about the tricks; it's about everything that goes in behind it.

But at the end of the day, you’ve got to be the best skier to be the best skier. Before you start talking to people, you’ve got to be the best skier. It's a good balance, but the most important thing always is your talent and your ability. But I really like the other side. I like the business side of skiing as well. I really enjoy getting to meet all these people and learning to work with them, and having the opportunity to view it as a business-oriented profession. At the end of the day, it is a job. Treat it like that.

Your skiing mostly appears in longer-form, professionally filmed projects as opposed to quick-hit TikToks or Instagram reels. Is that intentional on your part?

Yeah, I think for me, it's like if my job is just to put out videos and content of me skiing, then I want that to come out in a unique way. I want that to come out with as much passion as I can with as much impact as I can. I don't want those to be a classic TikTok video. I’m not trying to make my brand something that you scroll through, you know. I don't want my skill and my passion, and what I love more than anything, to be just like another scroll for someone. I want it to be appreciated.

So I think these TikTok videos, these reels. There's a space for it. Sure. And people's attention spans are short; I get it. But I think you become forgotten real fast when you load your career into a six-second reel. Moving forward, I think being a film skier is an opportunity to kind of choose how you present yourself, and there's so much opportunity to be creative and have style in the video and in the edit, and that's what I'm so passionate about. I’m almost just as passionate about the video side of it and the editing side and the video than I am the skiing.

What can we expect from you next season, skiing or otherwise?

I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to expect from next season, but for me, I just want to put my head down and work.

I don't know how much you'll see of my skiing next year. You'll definitely see some, but I think I'm going to be saving a lot for a much bigger project. So I think you'll be seeing me just working hard towards the next goal. Yeah, I think it's just going to be a time to just focus and really tap in. I've got some creative projects right now in the works. We've been working on some pitches right now. So expect some new shit. Some refreshing stuff for the ski industry.

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