Snowboard or skate, Jake Canter is ready to ride

When we were children, we usually looked for inspiration from the people closest to us.

For X Games snowboarder and Red Bull athlete Jake CanterHis path to snowboarding was through his babysitter.

“My babysitter was my next door neighbor and he was into skateboarding and snowboarding,” Canter said. “When he was babysitting, he would show me old Ryan Sheckler videos, Bob Burnquist videos and videos of Danny Davis and his team. It really inspired me – to see the madness of what people were capable of doing.

Red Bull athlete Jake Canter does a split on the flat at Pier 62 Skatepark, Chelsea Piers, New York, NY on June 20, 2024. — Jake Canter gaps on the flat at Pier 62 Skatepark in New York City

© Cole Giordano / Red Bull Content Pool

When Canter was about 6 or 7, his parents gave him a skateboard, and the following year, for Christmas, they gave him snowboarding lessons, the initial exploration of which felt completely natural to him.

“When I first got on a snowboard, I loved it,” Canter said. “We had a place in Steamboat, Colorado, right on the mountain, and when the mountain was closed, I would walk up there and try to learn. For skateboarding, I would just sit in the driveway and push and learn how to do ollies and pop-shoves.”

For both sports, Canter was largely self-taught, and although he loved both and felt he was good at them, he persisted because it was fun.

Red Bull athlete Jake Canter performs a backside grab in the deep end of the pool at Pier 62 Skatepark, Chelsea Piers, New York, NY on June 20, 2024. — Jake Canter does a backside grab in the deep end of a pool in New York City

© Cole Giordano / Red Bull Content Pool

“Obviously I wasn’t really escaping when I was 6 or 7, but it was pretty amazing to come home from school and skateboard in circles,” he said. “My dad then started taking me to skate parks and the mountains little by little and I just continued to develop my skills from there.”

But it wasn’t until he was 14 and won the Junior Jam at the Burton US Open that Canter began to see that the path ahead with snowboarding could be more than just a hobby.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s right,’ because that’s when the agents and sponsors started lining up,” he said. “The year after I won the Junior Jam, I went to New Zealand and made the finals in slopestyle and halfpipe. I was the youngest kid to make the top five. A lot of those kids are big names in the sport now, and I remember being there competing with all those kids when I was so young and realizing that I could compete with the older kids.”

Jake Canter competes in the Red Bull Snow Team Session in Mammoth Lakes, California, United States, on May 15, 2023. — Jake Canter rides his bike in Mammoth Lakes, California

© Peter Morning / Red Bull Content Pool

The kind of internal validation that only comes from the external realization that you’re in the same boat as your peers.

“It wasn’t necessarily the same caliber, but to be able to compete at their level in two disciplines was pretty crazy,” Canter said. “From that point on, I knew it was time to work to go even further.”

To go further, Canter had to immerse himself in both snowboarding and skateboarding, two different sports that, for him, complement each other.

“I love snowboarding and once the season is over I always look forward to getting on my skateboard and learning new tricks and skating with my friends,” he said. “I spend a lot of time in California and a lot of my skateboarding friends are the best skateboarders in the world — Keegan Palmer and Jagger Eaton— skating with them just pushes me forward.

For Canter, part of the transferable skills between sports is the mental approach he takes on a course.

“I look at a bowl and think about how I’m going to turn and hit, and then I take that same mindset and vision from a skatepark and apply it to a slopestyle course,” Canter said. “I try to snowboard a slopestyle course like a skate bowl so I can get a good flow.”

Visualizing the landscape of the journey he is about to undertake also translates into Canter’s ability to visualize and manifest his goals – a mental component of competition that, along with the physical component, is enhanced by a can of Red Bull.

“I usually have a spare can with me between snowboard runs and I try to drink it 30 minutes before my second run so it’s really in my system,” he said. “It helps me get some energy going into the second run.”

It’s the kind of energy it takes not only to compete at a high level, but also to stay disciplined and learn new tricks. In fact, part of Canter’s ability to learn new tricks is his ability to persevere, even if the process seems daunting at first.

“A lot of it is muscle memory, even though it’s scary to do a trick the first time no matter what,” Canter said. “That’s why I try to do the trick two or three times before I leave the mountain that day, and it’s the same thing with skateboarding. If I’m trying a new trick on skateboarding, I try to do it at least two or three times before I leave, just so I know I can do it and I’m not going to be afraid to go back and do it again.”

In this way, overcoming his fears of snowboarding and skateboarding gave Canter a tool in his toolbox to overcome other fears in life.

“It also helped me see things from a different perspective,” he said. “If something ‘bad’ happens, I know I’ll just have to work on it, but I’ll be fine.”

But the biggest tool for Canter is making sure he’s always having fun.

“My goal is also to grow the sport as much as possible,” he said. “When I’m having fun on my snowboard, no matter what tricks I’m doing, whether it’s big 18s or just 540s, it becomes less scary because I’m really enjoying it. It’s super fun to keep that mindset throughout the summer so that when I come back in the winter, I feel well-adjusted and ready to get back on the horse and start competing at a high level.”

Part of this story

Jake Canter

After overcoming a serious head injury, snowboarder Jake Canter is now determined to reach the top of slopestyle.