The recent 15th birthday of Noah Avallone, a part-time Montauker and ninth grader at the Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, was made all the more memorable by the fact that he had in April been named to the U.S. Snowboard 2022-23 Olympic rookie halfpipe team. It was another step on a path toward the 2026 Olympics in Cortina, Italy, that began for him when, at the age of 1 1/2, his parents, Mike and Michelle, strapped him to a snowboard at Montauk’s Third House and pushed him down the hill. “He stayed on, and he had a big smile on his face,” Noah’s father remembers.
Noah started competing as a 6-year-old, and at the age of 8, the curly-haired redhead won his first national championship in the sport. He has gone on to win 11 other national championships since.
“He’s just a step behind the guys who go to the Olympics,” Mike Avallone said the other day at the family’s house on Navy Road.
Noah, who is also a national champion surfer, said he loved snowboarding more than ever. “It’s really creative, so fun. . . . I’m working on a 1080 now.”
“It’s very different from being on a team,” his father said. “You have to set your own path. Standing sideways is his. He surfs and snowboards at the highest levels. And he skateboards too, but just for fun — it keeps him ready for snowboarding.”
The elder Avallone said he doubted that in the future Olympians would excel in two boarding events, as had been the case with the recently retired Shaun White, who once won X Game golds in snowboarding and skateboarding. Nor did he think, he said, that future Olympic snowboarders would compete in two events in that sport. “It’s too difficult. There’s too much competition. Noah does slopestyle and halfpipe now — they help each other — but to be ultra-competitive in both is very difficult. So, it’s halfpipe for him at the moment.”
Last year, at about this time, after he became the national under-14 longboard surfing champion in Oceanside, Calif., the question loomed as to which of his fortes — snowboarding or surfing — Noah would choose when it came to realizing his professional and Olympic ambitions. Stellar performances this winter have rendered that question moot: national championships in halfpipe and boardercross, a second-place halfpipe finish at a Nor-Am Cup event in Calgary, Canada, slopestyle and halfpipe wins in Laax, Switzerland, and another invitation to the Project Gold camp at California’s Mammoth Mountain, where he was to have been this past week.
Winning the Laax Open’s slopestyle and halfpipe under-15 events in Switzerland in March, along with two USASA national championships, was huge, said Noah’s father. And placing 12th in the Federation of International Skiing Junior World Championships’ halfpipe in Leysin had been “very respectable,” given that it had been his son’s Junior Worlds debut, and given that he was, as has often been the case, one of the youngest in the field.
“Basically, he’s doing what the pros do,” said Mike Avallone. “His goals were to progress to bigger features, to win a national championship in the halfpipe, to get invited to the Junior Worlds, to get invited to Project Gold’s development camp, and to make the U.S. team, all of which he did. He not only met his goals, he exceeded them.”