Maddy Schaffrick was 4 years old when her grandma asked what sport she wanted to compete in at the Olympics. Schaffrick didn’t hesitate. It didn’t matter, she said. She just wanted to go.
As a child, the idea carried no weight - no pressure, no calculation, no awareness of how narrow or unforgiving the path could be.
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For a while, it appeared she might get there the easy way. Schaffrick grew into one of the most promising young snowboarders in the country, a twirling, teenage wiz in halfpipe, traveling the world and living on her own. She had an agent, sponsors and that childhood dream.
But Schaffrick, 31, instead took what might be the longest, windiest path possible as perhaps the most unlikely American headed to the Milan Cortina Games - a former prodigy who burned out, walked away from the sport for nearly a decade, spent a year in what she calls a “cultlike” group and then learned the plumbing trade. Somehow she has returned not just intact but better than ever.
“I acknowledge how much it meant to me as a little kid,” Schaffrick said. “I’m doing this for little Maddy - for the little Maddy that wanted it so much.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThat clarity didn’t come easily.
“I thought I was done forever,” she said of her decision to walk away from snowboarding in 2015. “I wasn’t taking a break. I was leaving.”
The unraveling began years earlier. In 2010, while still a teenager, Schaffrick suffered a serious knee injury that sidelined her for nearly a year. For the first time, she was forced to watch the sport - and the world she had built around it - continue without her.
“That injury made me aware of how quickly it could all be gone,” she said.
She returned to competition, but the relationship had changed. Snowboarding was no longer something she simply loved; it was something she had to manage, protect and survive. The pressure - internal and external - followed her everywhere.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementWhen Schaffrick missed out on the 2010 and 2014 U.S. Olympic teams, she responded the only way she knew how at the time: by convincing herself they didn’t matter as much as she once thought they did.
“I started creating a story that they didn’t mean as much,” she said. “I think it was just to make the blow easier on myself.”
At the time, she leaned into snowboarding’s cultural skepticism of the Olympics, telling herself the Games weren’t central to the sport’s identity - a story that helped dull the disappointment, even as the dream she had carried since childhood went unresolved.
“I let down that little Maddy,” Schaffrick said. “That’s something I’ve lived with.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBy 2015, she was exhausted. Her body had paid the price for a professional career. She underwent five knee surgeries before turning 18, a toll that would later lead doctors to tell her she was a candidate for a knee replacement before she turned 30.
After seven years on the U.S. team, she made the decision to retire at 20. She did so with no mixed feelings or regrets.
“I was all in on finding something else,” Schaffrick said. “There was zero inkling - not even curiosity - about competing again.”
She didn’t leave with a plan. She left the only structure she had ever known. Snowboarding had shaped her entire adolescence - her schedule, her community, even her sense of momentum. Without it, there were no instructions for what came next.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLooking back now, Schaffrick calls it a “full-blown identity crisis.”
“I had no idea who I was without snowboarding,” she said. “It was so wrapped up in my identity. I didn’t know who I was, and I felt like I needed someone to tell me.”
During the final year of her career, she started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Through that community, she met people she trusted - people who seemed to have answers. She followed them into what she now describes as a religious-based, “cultlike” group in Salt Lake City, a group she declines to name.
“I didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I felt like I needed someone to tell me.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe group even gave her a different name. At the time, Schaffrick said, that felt less alarming than relieving.
“I was ready to become someone else entirely,” she said.
She spent more than a year there before realizing the situation wasn’t healthy. Leaving meant starting over yet again - without the sport, without the group and still without a clear sense of self.
Schaffrick returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and moved into her parents’ basement, living out of a suitcase and trying to orient herself. In need of a job, she turned to a neighbor and family friend who owned a plumbing business.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“She was kind of lost,” said Joe Clynes, owner of Alpenglow Plumbing and Heating. “She didn’t really know what she wanted to do. Plumbing wasn’t a career move. It was something to give her time to figure out where she wanted to go.”
Clynes took on Schaffrick as an apprentice. He called her a “a fish out of water,” but he was impressed by her work ethic and her positive attitude. “She showed up every day ready to learn,” he said.
The mountain was always nearby. Her friends were buying ski passes. She wanted one, too - but she didn’t want to spend the money. The solution was simple: volunteer as a snowboard coach. For seven hours per week, she was guiding 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds down the bunny slope.
Within a week, something had shifted.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“It had nothing to do with competition,” Schaffrick said. “It was just fun again.”
The joy surprised her. There were no expectations to manage, no outcomes to protect - just kids learning how to turn, fall and get back up.
From the outside, the shift was obvious.
“Seeing her go back to coaching and work with kids she loved - that’s when the love for the sport came back,” said Molly Clynes, a family friend and Joe’s daughter who grew up around Schaffrick in Steamboat Springs. “I think she started to realize, ‘Hey, I do love this sport.’”
Schaffrick kept coaching and soon became the snowboard program director at the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, working with athletes across ages and disciplines. The role forced her to confront what she hadn’t known how to articulate as a teenager: what snowboarding actually meant to her.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“I loved snowboarding,” she said. “But I didn’t know why.”
Helping other athletes discover their own reasons changed her relationship with the sport and, eventually, her place in it. In 2022, Schaffrick returned to the elite ranks as an assistant coach with the U.S. snowboard team, stepping back into a world she once believed she had left behind forever.
That fall, on her first international trip with the team, she found herself in Switzerland, sitting at the edge of the halfpipe and watching athletes drop in.
Everything came back. At first, it wasn’t ambition, just curiosity. A quiet, persistent question she couldn’t shake: What if I did it all again - but differently?
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe question lingered for months. In the summer of 2023, Schaffrick paid her own way to Mount Hood in Oregon, camped in a tent and trained alone. On the third day, she fell during warmups and broke her collarbone badly. But instead of discouraging her, it clarified everything.
“I knew what regret felt like,” she said. “I’d been living with it for eight years. And I was sick of it.”
The comeback that followed has been less about tricks than about intention. Schaffrick trains deliberately now, choosing where her focus goes, setting narrow goals, listening to her body in ways she never did before.
She’s older. She hurts more. She spends more time in the gym, more time recovering, more time thinking.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“I really gave up on myself in the past,” she said. “This time, I believe in myself.”
The difference isn’t just mental. It’s physical. Schaffrick is doing things in the halfpipe that she never did as a teenager. This season, she landed her first 900 in competition - the trick requires 2½ rotations in the air, something her younger self never reached.
“This journey has been about 25 percent what I’m doing,” she said, “and 75 percent how I’m doing it.”
The results have followed. After nearly nine years away from World Cup competition, Schaffrick returned to the podium this season, finishing third in China and second at the U.S. Grand Prix last month in Aspen, Colorado. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was confirmation.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAt the Milan Cortina Games, she’ll drop into the halfpipe alongside American teammates she was coaching just a few years ago, including Maddie Mastro and medal favorite Chloe Kim.
“They were family then,” she said. “They still are.”
For most of her life, the Olympics were the prize - something a 4-year-old decided she wanted before she even knew what it meant. Now they’re just the place Schaffrick gets to practice being who she finally is.
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