- Snowboarder Jake Pates advanced to the 2026 Winter Olympics halfpipe final after a four-year retirement.
- Pates retired from competitive snowboarding in 2020 due to mental health struggles and a concussion.
- He started the Happy Healthy Brain Foundation to help others after his own experience with a brain injury.
- Pates credits his return to the sport to the support of friends and fellow competitors.
LIVIGNO, Italy – As a pre-competition news conference was winding down for the United States men’s halfpipe snowboarding team at the 2026 Winter Olympics, Jake Pates leaned toward the microphone:
“Can I say one last thing?”
Pates wanted to take advantage of the platform, he said, to send a message.
“I think it’s really important to try to find the gratefulness in life and believe in yourself,” he said. “I’ve been someone who’s gone through a lot, I think, in my own way. … When you do have those tough moments, if you do lose hope and you do lose belief in yourself, you can find it again and you will find it again. You’ve just got to keep pushing.”
Just wanted to throw that out there, he closed, “if anyone is listening, going through a struggle.”
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Pates knows what he was describing. The fact that the 27-year-old from Colorado is even competing at these Olympics – much less having advanced to the 12-man Olympic halfpipe final – is one of the most improbable comeback stories in the 2026 Milano Cortina Games.
Once a fast-rising young star in the sport and an Olympian at age 19 in Pyeongchang in 2018, Pates ended up retiring from competitive snowboarding in 2020 for self-described mental health reasons.
“My reason for retirement was rooted in that loss of belief (in myself),” Pates said. “But it also had to do a lot with the presence of mental health issues that I was dealing with. Things like doubt, just negative spiraling, ruminating, depression. I had so much going on, so much anxiety.”
In 2019, Pates suffered a concussion in 2019 while competing, and according to the Team USA website, he initially lied to medical staff to avoid being sidelined. “When I did go back out, I was just all over the place with symptoms,” Pates later told Olympics.com. “Headache, dizziness, nausea, all the above. At the time, I never understood the impact that serious brain injuries could become.”
The ordeal led to Pates starting a non-profit in 2020, the Happy Healthy Brain Foundation, during a time when he also was stepping away from the sport.
“I took a full four years off of competing,” he said. “I would ride a little bit. I had probably two years where I only rode like 10 days each year. That amount of time, especially at the pace this sport progresses, is kind of crazy. … I just feel like I’m so blessed that I’ve been able to make this happen and come back. But I haven’t been able to do it by myself.”
He credits Japan’s Ayumu Hirano, a long-time friend and snowboard competitor (and 2022 halfpipe gold-medalist), and his brother Kaishu for helping convince him to return to the sport and helping train him to have a chance to do it successfully.
Pates returned to world cup competition about two years ago, gradually working to earn a place – through coaches’ discretion, per Team USA – on the 2026 Olympic team that was headed to Italy.
On a chilly Feb. 11 evening in Livigno, Pates fell on his first halfpipe run in Olympic qualifying. True to form, though, he bounced back. He scored a clutch 75.50 on his second run. Pates needed to surpass a 74 to climb into 12th place. A tense wait remained, but none of the final competitors passed him.
“It was kind of a nailbiter,” Pates said, “but we made it happen.”
So the final snowboarder on the U.S. halfpipe team (barely) was now the last finalist in Livigno (barely, again). Pates will be first to drop in a Feb. 13 finals field that’ll also include Ayumu Hirano.
“It’s unreal, man,” Pates said. “The journey has just been crazy. I’m blown away that I’m even at the Olympics, nonetheless being in the finals. Just filled with gratitude.
‘My heart is full.”
Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@gannett.com and hang out with him on Bluesky @gentryestes.bsky.social