Kelly Clark

She started out on skis at the age of 2 and took up snowboarding at 8. She grew up in West Dover, Vt., the town where Mount Snow is located, and she trained at the resort's academy. In 1998 she recorded the snowboarding competition from the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, on a VHS tape and watched it after school. She called that a "defining moment" in her life and it was what led her to decide to dedicate herself to the sport so she could someday compete at the Olympics. Clark graduated from Mount Snow Academy in 2001, and that year her parents gave her one more year to prove herself in snowboarding or else she would have to give up her Olympic dream to go to college. She qualified for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, taking home the gold in the halfpipe. That win made her - at 18 - the youngest American snowboarder to win an Olympic medal. She qualified for the Winter Games again in 2006, finishing in fourth place, and in 2010 and 2014, earning a bronze in each of those years. She sustained her first major injuries in February 2016, a torn hamstring and a torn labrum in her hip. It took her several months to recover from the surgery, but she returned to the snow later in the year and was back to winning contests within a few months. Clark finished the 2016-17 season ranked No. 2 in the World Snowboard Tour's halfpipe standings behind fellow American Chloe Kim. Clark made history as the first woman to land a 1080 in a halfpipe run at the 2011 X Games, which became a staple of her runs. In January 2018 she qualifed for the U.S. Olympic team, representing the U.S. at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.