Snowboarder Siddhartha Ullah brings powerful message to Gangwon 2024: "I want to support the sport to be more reflective of the world"
Olympics.com talked to the British rider about his experience as an ethnic minority in the sport, his first time dropping into a halfpipe, early admission to Stanford University, and how he got his summer-loving mother to strap on a snowboard.
Snowboard
As Siddhartha Ullah’s school class went around the circle to ask what students wanted to become when they grew up, the seven-year-old did not think twice about his answer.
“When other people were like, 'I want to be firefighters, I want to be a police officer, I want to be a garbage truck man'. I was, 'I want to be a snowboarder',” Ullah told Olympics.com. “When everybody was doing their little assignments, writing down what they want to be, I put that down.”
Ten years later, Ullah is set to compete in the snowboard halfpipe at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) for Great Britain.
The journey from child daydreamer to international rider is not the only remarkable detail about Ullah’s appearance at Gangwon 2024.
With his participation, Ullah is also breaking ethnic barriers as he is considered to be the first snowboarder of black or south Asian descent to compete at a Youth Olympics. It is a distinction that the 17-year-old British athlete and Stanford University student takes in stride.
“I am just proud of who I am,” said Ullah, whose mother is British-Bangladeshi and father is African-American. “I'm unapologetically black, I'm unapologetically Asian, so I feel like it's just really important to represent who I am, where I come from and to...encourage other people to get into the sport.”
How Siddhartha Ullah turned his mother’s summer escape into permanent winter
Ullah’s mother, Shamya, disliked the cold so much, she moved from New York to Los Angeles to escape it. As it turned out, after her son tried snowboarding, escaping winter was no longer an option.
“She definitely isn't a big fan of winter at all,” Ullah said. “She always jokes, ‘I wish you would have been a surfer or been a skateboarder’, just something that isn't in the cold.”
Ullah first stepped on a snowboard when he was two. At five, he tried again at Mountain High, an hour’s drive from Los Angeles where he and his mother lived.
“I just loved it,” Ullah said. “I became obsessed with it and I kept begging my mom, ‘Please let me snowboard more and more’. And then she let me. She was like, 'OK, this is a good way to use his energy'.”
The Sochi 2014 Olympic Games were the next turning point in young Ullah's snowboarding ambitions.
Tuning into the halfpipe competition on TV, the seven-year-old was mesmerised by the sight.
“I saw them, and I was like, 'Those guys are flying!'” he recalled. “Halfpipe, if you watch people air, they have so much time in the air and there's so much style and there's so much personality that you can capture with each person's riding.”
The eventual silver medallist, Hirano Ayumu, made a particularly strong impression. Fifteen at the time, the Japanese athlete who stands at 1.65m, stomped a run that sparked Ullah’s belief that he could do the same.
“I was always much tinier than everybody else in my grade because I also started school young,” Ullah said. “And then watching someone who at the time was so much younger than the rest of the field, watching him be in it, I just really related to it myself. Also as a fellow Asian person, I was just like, 'Wow, I could really do that'.”
And so, as the Olympic Flame was extinguished in Sochi, Ullah’s own Olympic journey began.
“Watching Sochi Games really made me realise this is what I want to do. This is what I want to spend the majority of my time doing. This is what I want to do when I grow up,” he said. “And in my training, I went from just riding on the weekends to pretty much the next year riding 10 months out of the year, so basically every day on snow.”
Shamya Ullah first took her son to try snowboarding when he was two.
The magic of halfpipe: From the Disney Channel to the real deal
The Olympics were the first time that Ullah saw a halfpipe. After that, it seemed like images of the snowy ramp were following him everywhere. Cloud 9, a 2014 movie about teenage snowboarders, was running on repeat on the Disney Channel, and three-time Olympic halfpipe gold medallist Shaun White was appearing regularly on the news.
While the halfpipe became a familiar sight for Ullah on the TV screen, it was a different experience altogether seeing it in real life.
“When I actually saw one, I was at Big Bear [Mountain Resort], and that was an incredible feeling,” Ullah said. “It wasn't even a 22-foot superpipe. It was a 13-foot mini-pipe. But I remember seeing it, I was like, ‘This is so cool, I want to get in it’.”
Gathering his nerve, Ullah took the plunge.
“When you first get in the halfpipe, it definitely can be overwhelming because the walls are so big, but as I was in there, I kind of got used to it. You get more comfortable, and I really fell in love with it the first time I dropped in,” he said.
“I grew up riding everything. I grew up racing. I grew up riding rails. But since I got on the board, I always knew that halfpipe was the thing I wanted to do. That was the reason I started competing.”
Go as big as you want: The freedom, creativity, and intellect of snowboarding
There is a creative and intellectual side to snowboarding that draws Ullah to the sport.
A skateboarder and surfer growing up, he was already familiar with what freestyling entailed, but transferring his board tricks to snow proved even more liberating than he expected.
“What drew me to snowboarding as opposed to the other sports was just how free it felt,” Ullah said. “Skating I feel like I also love, but you just can't go as big. There are limitations on a skateboard, definitely limitations on a surfboard, but on a snowboard, you can just go as big as you want. You can go as fast as you want.”
While Ullah’s main focus is snowboarding, he skates for four to six hours each day when not on snow and continues to scan the skate park for inspiration.
Another aspect that attracted Ullah to freestyle snowboarding is the mental agility it requires. In competition, riders often have to switch up their plans on short notice to react to the tricks their opponents are putting down.
“There isn't a single person in the sport who isn't super mentally tough,” Ullah said. “It takes a lot of focus, so that's another thing I really love about this sport, being surrounded by a bunch of really determined people.”
Intelligence is something Ullah can easily appreciate. He was the valedictorian of his class and admitted to Stanford University one year early.
Planning to specialise in neuroscience, he shares this alma mater with other famous freestylers, double Olympic and Youth Olympic champion skier Eileen Gu and double world medallist Zoe Atkin.
Siddhartha Ullah: “Snowboarding is for everybody”
Out in the halfpipe with his long hair flowing free from under the helmet, his darker skin and distinct features, Ullah knows he does not fit the image of a stereotypical snowboarder.
While he did not feel it much riding at Mountain High where there is a diverse weekend crowd thanks to LA’s proximity, Ullah's unique look did turn heads once he started entering competitions.
“It's not that I didn't notice it. I didn’t feel different,” Ullah said. “But I definitely noticed it as I got more competitive, that there was lack of diversity in the sport.”
Looking up to ethnically diverse riders such as Keir Dillon, Russell Winfield, and Zeb Powell when growing up, Ullah now hopes that his profile at major competitions will also be a beacon to fellow ethnic minorities.
“My number one focus has always been the snowboarding, so I've always really focussed on the riding and not let the other parts of it distract me too much. I really didn't let it discourage me at all,” Ullah said. “But it definitely is a very important thing for me to encourage other people to get into snowboarding and also to support the sport to be more reflective of the world.”
“The amazing thing about sports is there isn't anything in sports that isn't for anybody. Everybody can participate. Everybody can enjoy sports. Snowboarding is for everybody," - Siddhartha Ullah to Olympics.com
Not a fan of winter at the start, Shamya Ullah now joins her son on his snowboard rides.
How Siddhartha Ullah met his childhood hero and got his mum to love winter
A lot has changed for Ullah since he made his first turns on a snowboard.
One milestone was making his World Cup debut at Copper Mountain in 2021. In February 2023 Ullah returned to the same resort for the Dew Tour where he competed against his Sochi 2014 hero Hirano.
“That was one of my first competitions competing against him and I have a photo of, I think it's seven-year-old me or eight-year-old me with him, the first time I met him. And then I showed it to him, when I competed against him, and I was like, 'This is me and you 10 years ago',” Ullah said. “It was a super cool experience.”
Perhaps an even cooler one was getting his summer-loving mother to join him on snowboard rides.
“She didn't come from a background of snowboarding or skiing or anything, before me. So when I got into it, she was skiing and as a snowboarder, I was like, ‘I don't want my mom on skis!’,” Ullah said. “She was like, ‘OK, I'll learn how to snowboard’, so she learned how to snowboard and has been doing that for a while. It’s been awesome.”