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Whistler skier makes jump to national team

Freestyle Whistler’s Brynn Johnston looks to take her skills to the next level
Screen Shot 2022-07-05 at 10.22.34 AM
Comox B.C.’s Brynn Johnston gets some air during a competition in 2022.

Three years ago, Comox, B.C. skier Brynn Johnston was winning pretty much every U14 competition she could enter as a 13-year-old on the BC Timber Tour.

Seemingly primed to continue her dominance in slopestyle and big air skiing, little did Johnston know, the next two years would be spent with little-to-no competitions, just trying to get as much skiing and training in as she could.

Fast forward to 2022, the now 16-year-old Johnston hasn’t skipped a beat. In her first year competing on the Nor-Am Cup circuit, the Freestyle Whistler athlete snagged two top-10 finishes including a big air second and slopestyle seventh in Stoneham, Que.

In the same season, Johnston also made her first appearance at the Junior World Championships in Leysin, Switzerland, where she landed on top of the podium in big air and just off the podium with a fourth-place finish in slopestyle.

And in early June, all the hard work and results paid off for Johnston, who received the call she had been working towards since she first committed to freestyle skiing at 12 years old—she made Team Canada.

“The call was from the coach, so I kind of assumed it would be either good or bad,” said Johnston. “I had so many thoughts going through my head when I got the call, but I was super ecstatic to get the invite to Team Canada. It definitely happened a lot quicker than I expected, and I was just super excited.”

Since the news, which Johnston describes as “pretty high up there” on her list of career accomplishments so far, along with her Junior Worlds gold medal, Johnston has joined the team for training on Horstman Glacier in Whistler and is being pushed harder than she ever has before in her young ski career.

“I’ve been doing lots of gym training and working on my nutrition, seeing the nutritionist, and then when I came [to the camp on Horstman], it was just putting all that work to snow again. And then after skiing, we do gym every day,” she said.

“It’s been really different, for sure. With my last team, we definitely didn’t train as much.”

While Johnston has already started to see the benefits of her new training regimen, she believes her skills will continue to grow exponentially just by watching and learning from her new Olympic-level teammates, like Megan Oldham and Olivia Asselin, about how to approach training like a pro and how to get that “little extra bit” out of yourself in competition.

When the 2022-23 season gets underway, Johnston will be looking to build on the success she had last year and continue her strong skiing on the Nor-Am Cup circuit, while taking advantage of the experience she’ll get from the World Cup berth she earned at last year’s Junior World Championships.

“It’s usually pretty hard to get the spot, so I’ve never competed in the World Cup. I think it would be a really cool experience but also a little bit stressful, for sure,” said Johnston. “I definitely think it’s going to be pretty tough just because it’s the best skiers in the world at them. So I think honestly, just being there, being able to get the experience for following years when the results maybe mean a little bit more, I think could be really helpful.”

Long term, Johnston sees herself competing at multiple Olympic Games throughout her career, hopefully even as soon as soon as the 2026 Games in Italy. While competing at the games at 20 years old could be seen as a tall task, with Canada’s Asselin and Oldham both competing at the 2022 Olympics at the ages of 18 and 20, respectively, nothing is out of reach for the team’s newest member.