Sadowski-Synott, Porteous joint winners in awards

The Snow Sports New Zealand annual awards winners were announced digitally yesterday due to Covid-19 Level 2 restrictions.

Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous were  joint winners of the overall athlete of the year.

They were the first joint winners of  the award in  more than a decade.  

Both had strong seasons, achieving New Zealand firsts, world firsts and both landing on the podium at every competition they dropped into. 

In March 2021, Sadowski-Synnott  became the first person to successfully defend a snow board slopestyle World Championships title.  

She won the Big Air World Cup in Kreischberg, claimed a silver medal (snowboard slopestyle) and a bronze medal (snowboard big air) at the prestigious Aspen X Games and won the Jackson Hole stop of the Natural Selection Tour. 

Porteous won New Zealand’s first ever X Games freeski superpipe gold medal with a never-landed-before in competi tion trick combination of back to back 1620s. He went on to win the freeski halfpipe World Championships title, the first Kiwi to win this title.