The Finns are ridiculously talented riders. Why? Pure want. Building kickers in the trees when there’s nothing else to ride, sessioning a rail on a cold, dark winter night in Helsinki, doing laps in the one park within a 500-mile radius, over and over and over. And Antii Autti personifies this ethos. But the X Games champ has taken his park game to the mountains in the last few years. Needless to say, it’s transferred seemlessly.
¨We’re all products of our environment,” he says. “In Finland it means that snowboarding in the mountains is almost as rare as catching waves in the Baltic Sea. Not too many people do it. When I was growing up all I wanted to do was to learn new tricks but when I began to ride backcountry, I needed to start thinking differently about my snowboarding. Suddenly it was not only about take off, airtime and landing. Riding in the mountains opened my eyes to what having flow in your riding really means.”
Exactly Antti. And this edit is proof, that all those sessions in the street or at the park weren’t for naught.
