Chinese snowboarding protégé Patti Zhou was just 11 years old when she made her Dew Tour debut in 2023, stunning with a 2nd place finish in the halfpipe behind Gaon Choi in her first pro-level competition becoming the youngest medalist in Dew Tour history.
Her run––which opened with a switch backside 900 melon––left fans and judges (and Patti) in awe.
“I was just astounded,” Zhou says of her podium result, looking back on the triumph as she prepares for her return to Copper Mountain. “Before, I’d only seen Dew Tour on TV. When I was there as a competitor it was quite fun because I could feel the crowd’s energy giving me energy. I just have to thank everybody at Dew Tour for giving me this chance, and I’m also thankful that Copper Mountain hosts such a great competition with so much energy and everybody’s having so much fun. It’s the best place to snowboard ever.”
Though she’s spent most of this season training back home in China, at the Secret Garden Genting venue that hosted the halfpipe competitions for the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Zhou considers Copper Mountain her second home. She first came over in 2020 to ride at Woodward Copper and ended up getting stuck there due to pandemic travel restrictions, a series of events she now considers a blessing. During that time, she first met her coach, Scott Harris, and connected with sponsors, including Burton Snowboards and Woodward Copper.
Her snowboarding origin story goes even farther back: Zhou says she first tried snowboarding with her parents when she was two years old, then started taking it more seriously after a kindergarten show-and-tell experience.
“I went to kindergarten at a Montessori school, and my teacher tried to get all the little kids to try different things,” Zhou says. “In a year with 12 different months, my teacher told us to try 12 different things. Then, on each kid’s birthday, each kid would show the 12 different things they did that year and go around the circle sharing the pictures. For my birthday, I chose to go snowboarding so I would have something awesome to share, and this is what inspired me to keep snowboarding. I’m very thankful for my kindergarten teacher. If she was here right now I would say, ‘Thank you, thank you!'”
When Zhou was 7 and 8 years old, she spent two seasons riding in Japan with her parents. “Every day the snow would be over my head, and when I would fall I would think, ‘This sucks! It hurts so much.'”
On the verge of quitting, she says she found inspiration to take a more playful approach to snowboarding and to keep exploring the mountain from an unlikely source.
“One time I was going up the chairlift and I saw two little squirrels jumping around in the snow and I thought, “Ooh! That looks so fun!” After that, my seasonal goal changed from trying not to fall to trying to find as many mountain creatures as I could and trying to play like them. I found a mountain goat mama with its little baby. Japanese mountain goats are really pretty! They have golden fur, and they’re very majestic, and I hope I can see one again. And then I saw lots of marmots when I went to Mt. Hood. They are fat!”
Until about a week ago, Zhou wasn’t sure she was going to make it back in time for Dew Tour, but finally got her travel visa sorted out with a few days to spare. “I’m coming, everybody, so watch out!”
You heard it here first: The Patti Party is back in full force.
A year ago, in her podium interviews, Zhou cracked everybody up by saying she was going to use the prize money to buy a bunch of candy for herself and some tequila for her coach. If she wins this year, she has an additional goal: “I want to buy some chocolate for each of my competitors,” she says. “I just love them all so much.”
To get there, she says she’s been working on a potentially game-changing new trick (“but I can’t tell you what it is”) and has some other new goals: “I’ve been working a lot on going bigger, getting more style, getting a lot of flow.”
For anyone who was surprised to see an 11-year-old take 2nd place last year, on a podium with an average age of 14, Zhou says to get used to it.
“Young women have a new style,” she says. “There’s a new generation! Like waves that come after each other, we have to be the bigger and better waves. We have to say, ‘Go away little wave! We have more style, we have more flow, we have more tricks. We’ve got it! We’re coming!'”
To catch Patti Zhou in action, don’t miss the Women’s Snowboard Superpipe Final on Saturday, March 9 at Copper Mountain’s Center Village base area. Click through for the full event schedule.
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