Maddie Mastro looks to push halfpipe progression on behalf of all women riders

When Maddie Mastro drops into the Olympic halfpipe for the second time for Team USA, she’s clear on what she’s looking to prove in her competitive career.

“My goals are double corks, which are something that we haven’t really explored for women yet in halfpipe,” she said in a recent episode of the On Her Turf podcast. “But the men do it. And I think [my wanting to do doubles] is kind of helping with the whole progression.

“Then it’ll directly hopefully correlate to women’s progression and pushing our sport more and more into that and having double courts involved. But for me, that’s always been a really big thing: (I’m) trick orientated — I want to do the big tricks, and I want to do doubles in particular.”

The Southern California native, who turns 21 on Feb. 22, arrives in Beijing for her second Winter Olympics as a two-time world championship medalist, winning bronze in 2018 and silver in 2021 behind champion and teammate Chloe Kim. Mastro and Kim grew up on the same mountain in Mammoth, and she credits the 2018 Olympic gold medalist with pushing her progression the last four years.

But Mastro also points to incessant comparisons to her male counterparts and her desire to be an example to young women riders as motivation as well.

“It was just frustrating for me to constantly be compared, like, ‘You’re not as good as the men,’ and I want to change that,” she explains.

“We’re trying, we’re working on it, we’re progressing, and we are going to be as good. And I just want to change that narrative completely, so that you can’t even bring that up — that men do harder tricks or whatever it is. It’s, ‘We do the same stuff.’”

In 2018, Mastro became the first woman to land a double crippler (two backflips), and in November 2021