After an exciting off-season, freestyle skier Nico Porteous is looking to unveil some new tricks at Saturday's Aspen X Games.
The 2018 Winter Games bronze medalist has been working hard during the off-season and is looking forward to unveiling some new moves that will hopefully propel him onto the podium in the halfpipe event.
"I learned a new trick in September last year, which is something I've been working on for the past year and a half," Porteous told Newshub.
"Hopefully I can bring that out in my X Games run and that trick has never been done before, so hopefully we can get that done and see what happens."
Porteous need's little motivation heading into his biggest event of the year as the teenager has racked up an impressive resume with his biggest achievement being a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics in 2018.
The Hamilton native feels a change in mindset has him in good stead for success at the X Games.
"Last year I was all caught up on where I finished," Porteous says. "It's been a long time now since getting a bronze at the Olympics and having a season after that where I achieved quite a few podiums it made me more hungry to stand on the podium rather than being hungry to be the best skier possible.
"With this new mindset of going out there and being the best I can be it's been good and I've been training hard and just trying to be the best skier possible."
The New Zealand ski team are under strict self-enforced lockdown while they compete in Colorado and the 19-year-old is still coming to grips with his new reality.
"It's definitely been a shock to the system coming from summer to full winter, but the elephant in the room of COVID and the whole situation going on in America was a real shock to the system,' he says.
"We are pretty much halfway between level three and four in the New Zealand levels and that's something we have inflicted on ourselves as a New Zealand team.
"We are wiping down the house, high contact areas, all the groceries, washing our hands, so it's a mix of level three and four, just the difference is we are allowed to go skiing."
Porteous and Beau-James Wells will both compete in the Ski Superpipe on Saturday while in-form snowboarder Zoi Sadowski-Synnott will compete in the Big Air, while Jossi Wells will take part in a new event called the Ski Knuckle huck.
