Sébastien Toutant learned all of his early snowboard tricks not in the Canadian Rockies, but on the ice of Quebec.
He became a steely and creative rider, and the first Canadian to win Olympic gold in a judged snowboarding event.
“At first I couldn’t really speak English and was just speaking French,” he said. “I feel like it was kind of harder to make a name for yourself in the snowboard world. So I felt like I had to do more than maybe a normal kid in the snowboard industry that was more from the U.S. or somewhere else. So I think it made me work always harder.”
Toutant, who won the first Olympic men’s big air event in 2018, has after 18 years of competing shifted his focus to filming his riding.
He stepped away from contests after his third Olympics in 2022 and does not plan to return to major big air or slopestyle competition.
“I still want to push the sport, but the contests, I wasn’t really able to really show the stuff that I had in mind or the stuff that I wanted to do to progress the sport because those tricks were not the tricks that were actually going to win the contest,” Toutant said. “So now that I’m filming more, like streets or special projects with my sponsors, and more backcountry stuff, those are all environments that I want to do more in my sport.”
That includes “No Big Deal,” a personal journey shot entirely on the streets of Quebec that was published last week.
“I’m super hyped to work on new stuff,” he said. “It’s not because I want to take it easy. It’s the opposite. I want to go hard, and now I still want to push the sport, but I want to just be more like who I want to be as a snowboarder.”
Toutant, known as “Seb Toots,” started riding at age 9 after his parents refused to replace his broken skis, forcing him to take runs on his brother’s old snowboard if he wanted to go fast on snow.
He earned his first professional contest win at age 13. He then paced a golden generation of Canadian male snowboarders.
In 2011, Toutant became the first Canadian to win an X Games slopestyle title. Mark McMorris of Saskatchewan, who is 13 months younger, then took the torch and won four of the next five years in Aspen.
After Toutant broke through with Olympic gold in 2018 (after a back injury severely limited his riding for a year), fellow Québécois Max Parrot followed with slopestyle gold and big air bronze in 2022.
McMorris is still competing and bids for a fourth Olympics in 2026. Parrot is currently assessing plans regarding a possible return to competition, a rep said earlier this month.
Toutant’s last major event was the 2022 Olympics, where he crashed in big air qualifying as the defending gold medalist. Toutant competed despite bruising his heel so bad in practice that it limited his ability to walk.
“When I start talking with other people that don’t know snowboarding as much, I feel like being an Olympian is something that not a lot of people can say,” he said. “Being a gold medalist, it’s just something that everybody can understand the work that goes behind it. So it’s sick.”