Olympic Slopestyle gold medalist Sage Kostenburg has become the new face of snowboarding overnight. Timbo and the dose crew sat down with Sage in his NYC hotel suite to discuss his recent Olympic gold medal win, what's its like being the object of the media's attention and his dreams of getting inner city kids on the hill with him. He also discusses Shaun White's next moves and his real thoughts on the safety of the slopestyle course. Interview highlights: Tim: How does the Olympic gold medal reality differ from the Olympic gold medal dream? Sage: It's funny because a lot of people like the figure skaters and gymnasts and stuff, like five years old they're training for this one moment. Whereas snowboarding you just snowboard and if you get good and you like doing contests and you end up doing good at some then you go to the Olympics. But not very many people, I hope not, start snowboarding just to win the Olympics. There's so much more to snowboarding besides winning a gold medal. There was so much negative stuff going on with the course and it was just dragging everyone down. And the whole media was blowing up that the course was dangerous and too risky and scary. The course was fun, the media wanted a story and you know, I'm just going to be positive and just have fun. You've got to wash all that stuff away because everyone's asking me every day—there's people sitting at the bottom of practice asking, "is the course okay," "is it safe today?" And I'm like, yeah, I mean it's dangerous, we're not riding lollipops, it's not like it's mellow, it's really a gnarly course, it's was big, but it was a fun course, too. As much as it's dangerous, everything in snowboarding is dangerous. The taxi ride over to the hotel, that was dangerous—sketchy traffic, weaving in and out—I feel like that's more dangerous than going down a slopestyle course because we're in control you know? T: Have you been surprised by how much mainstream media has really taken to you? S: It was crazy just because it was the first event of the Sochi games, and then I ended up winning it, so it was the first gold medal, I later found out, I was the first ever American to win a gold medal on Russian soil in the winter Olympics in history. So I was like, all right now I know why everyone's blowing it up a little bit more. T: Would you say that this Olympics marks the end of the Shaun White era of snowboarding? S: I don't know if it marks the end of the Shaun White era because he already claimed that he was going to come back for 2018, so he's going to be back you know. Shaun's a good guy and he's the face of snowboarding to the mass media whether you like it or you don't. He's won two Olympic gold medals, that's a pretty awesome feat. I can't even process winning another one. That's crazy, it's like four years so. I think this is just sick because it's opened up people's eyes that there's a lot more snowboarders besides just Shaun White. I feel like before this Olympics literally if you asked someone, 'oh you know about snowboarding?' They'd be like, 'yeah I know Shaun White.' 'Dude you know anyone else?' "No there's no other snowboarder that's as good as him.' You can't deny that he's really really good at competing, and just to see other people get credit where they've worked so hard getting here, and there's other people besides Shaun White. Although he's dominated snowboarding competitively, there's so many other people with super sick style and different mentality in snowboarding. People are just now getting it. I think it definitely opened up the eyes to be like, 'oh there's other people besides this one guy.' --- Subscribe to Network A! ‪‪‪http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=networka‬ Check out the new http://www.networka.com/ Like us on Facebook: ‪‪‪https://www.facebook.com/networka‬‬‬ Follow us on Twitter: ‪‪‪http://www.twitter.com/networka‬‬‬ Follow us on Tumblr: ‪‪‪http://networka.tumblr.com‬‬‬ Follow us on Instagram: http://instagram.com/networka Follow us on Google+: www.google.com/+NetworkA

• published: 15 Feb 2014
• views: 365