‘I want to win gold’: the 16-year-old taking snowboarding to new heights

‘W hen I stood at the top of the run, I felt something in the air,” says 16-year-old Mia Brookes, her face etched with joy and awe as she relieves the dizzying trick that made her the youngest world champion in snowboarding history this year. “I knew it was going to happen. It was really weird.”

Until last month no female snowboarder had ever attempted a Cab 1440 double grab in competition. Little wonder. The trick is so risky it should carry an X-certificate. But on a witchy day in Bakuriani, Georgia, something magical was brewing. On her second run, with the slopestyle world championship on the line, the schoolgirl from Sandbach in Cheshire flew backwards off a ramp, twisted her body through four rotations while also grabbing her board twice, and landed smoothly and serenely.

“It was only the second time I had tried it,” she says. “But I knew if I landed, it would be an automatic win. Going down the course I was like: ‘Right, this is one step closer to doing the 14’. As I got to the jump, I thought to myself: ‘I’ve landed everything up to this point’, so I was confident.

“Afterwards, it was pretty intense. I didn’t really know if I should be excited or cry because I was so happy.”

The trick was the culmination of a near-perfect run that earned her gold ahead of the reigning Olympic champion, Zoi Sadowski-Synnott. It was also some rise to prominence given that Brookes was too young to compete in last year’s Beijing Games. But this was a success story 14 years in the making, from the moment her parents, Nigel and Vicky, first took Brookes on to the slopes at 18 months old.

Nigel’s job as a mechanic and Vicky’s as a hairdresser meant they were able to work while snowboarding around Europe in their family motorhome and