Sam van Lieshout: The Dutch freestyle snowboard hopeful defying the odds
No freestyle snowboarder from the Netherlands has won a medal in major competition, but the 17-year-old aims to break new ground after impressive performances at the Winter European Youth Olympic Festival and Junior World Championships.
Snowboard
As a naturally flat country with low-lying poppy-filled plains, the Netherlands is not an obvious hotbed for freestyle snowboard talent.
With its picturesque canals and quaint fishing villages, the small European nation is best known for its strength in speed skating and road, BMX and track cycling.
But in 17-year-old Sam van Lieshout, the Dutch have a rising star in slopestyle and Big Air.
An FIS European Cup runner-up and silver medallist at the Winter European Youth Olympic Festival 2023 in Tarvisio, Italy, van Lieshout has emerged as one of her country's top podium prospects at the upcoming Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympics.
“I started snowboarding when I was six years old because I saw somebody snowboarding and thought, ‘Oh that was cool’”, van Lieshout told Olympics.com in an interview via a translator.
On her yearly holiday with her family in Austria, she knew instantly she wanted to discover more about the sport.
She recalled, "I got invited to a clinic which gets more girls to freestyle snowboarding and that’s where I saw my team (SHRED Masters) and that’s when I wanted to be a member.”
Founded in 2014 in Landgraaf, SHRED Masters is an academy which aims to create a path for young snowboarders looking to become professional athletes.
It is also home to van Lieshout’s coach Andrea Bednas who, like her student, is hoping to tread new ground in the sport.
Among a select few female coaches in the discipline, Bednas is part of WISH, an Olympic Solidarity program designed to promote female coaches in high-performance sports.
Working with young snowboarders, as she has done with van Lieshout since she was six years old, is part of Bednas' wider mission besides raising a new generation of stars.
“It’s important for female athletes to see that you don’t necessarily have to be a male to go into coaching,” she told the IOC. “There is a path you can take.”
Sam van Lieshout - "It was a really happy feeling"
Targeting the dream of being able to snowboard for the rest of her life, van Lieshout is a young athlete deeply committed to her goals.
Spending some 10 to 12 weeks away from home travelling in parts of Germany and Austria, a typical day of training for the Dutch snowboarder is a long one.
“I get up, eat breakfast and then we go up [the mountain] and then we do a little warm-up, we check out the park to see what we can do, which tricks we can do and see if it’ll work or if it won’t work and then we go," she said.
“When we come there are always a few tasks that we need to do. We have to shower, do homework and then wax the boards. And that takes a lot of time. Then we have dinner and then after today we don’t do a lot because we want to wake up early again the next morning.”
The hard work is already beginning to pay off with van Lieshout winning Big Air silver at last January's Winter European Youth Olympic Festival.
But another Big Air silver, at Götschen in her debut season on the European Cup circuit, remains van Lieshout’s favourite snowboard memory.
“The circumstances there were difficult, " she recalled. "There was a lot of wind and it was snowing and people were not landing their tricks. And after my second run, I landed [my trick] and I already knew in that moment it was enough for the podium and it was a really happy feeling."
EYOF 2023 women's Big Air podium (L-R): runner-up Sam van Lieshout, winner Kristina Holzfeind, third-placed Selin Lakatha
Sam van Lieshout hopes to "snowboard for the rest of my life"
Ask van Lieshout which snowboard star she likes watching the most, the answer comes with little hesitation: New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott.
“She always has the possibility to land,” van Lieshot explained.
“Even in the air, if she’s not really perfect, you can see her spotting the landing and then just going. So that’s really nice. That’s something I look up to.”
And just like the trailblazing Kiwi who made her name at the Winter Olympics, van Lieshout also has a future appearance at the Games in her sights:
“I hope to snowboard for the rest of my life as much as possible. And if it all goes well, an end goal would be to get to the Olympics, for sure.”
The perfect preparation for the young shredder’s Olympic dream will come at Gangwon 2024 where she is set to compete.
With her 2023 results, which also include top-10 finishes in slopestyle and Big Air at the FIS Park and Pipe World Junior Championships in New Zealand in August and September, she will be surely one to watch.