Sage Kotsenburg

Park City, Utah

Plant Based Olympic Gold Medalist

https://www.instagram.com/sagekotsenburg

Winning an Olympic Gold Medal for many people will always be the pinnacle of their career, regardless of the sport or where they’re from. The same is likely true for Sage, who in 2014 shocked the world with a run in snowboarding’s slopestyle event that had never been seen before. I was lucky enough to be working with Sage at the time and just as he won, I threw him some new goggles to ensure his branding was on point and ran up to him hugged him and said, “I’ll see you in a few months!” He was like, “what do you mean?” I knew the impact that winning a gold medal would have on him and sure enough, the next morning there was a private jet taking him from Russia back to New York where he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel, Letterman and a whole host of shows. That meteoric rise is pretty hard for most people to handle. Sage went with it for a couple of months, the invites, the parties, the selfies and then he made a decision to get back to what he knows and loves, snowboarding. Pretty soon after, he made the choice to leave the competitive arena and everything that had brought him and dedicate himself to learning the ways of riding in the backcountry, an altogether different proposition. One where hard work takes on a new meaning, with 4am wake up calls to build your own jumps, avalanche dangers and the weeks of bad weather. All that hiking led Sage to question how best to operate on an optimum level. At the age of 23, at what should have been his physical peak, Sage was feeling sluggish and didn’t have the energy needed for his new pursuits. It was at that point that Sage made the conscious decision to go plant based vegan. Two and a half years after committing to this new way of living, Sage had gained a new energy, a flow all his own and won Snowboarder Magazine Rider of the Year and Video Part of the Year, two of his goals after leaving competitive snowboarding. I wanted to see how much his diet change had to do with that and to catch up with one of the world’s best loved Olympic athletes.

Jon Weaver: So, you've been Plant Based three years since June?

Sage Kotsenburg: Yeah, so this June coming up I'll be three years eating Plant Based and absolutely loving it! 

What kind of shifted you into following this diet?

I was always really intrigued with different people's diets, especially in sports. So I was reading about all these long distance runners shifting to a plant-based diet. Back then I was definitely not feeling my best. I mean, I was 23 and I should have been feeling amazing. And so, I just made this choice. I do everything really intensely, so I just took everything out of my diet for like two months. After doing two months of, you know, eating super clean I was feeling amazing, so I thought I'm just going to vibe with this. It fits my ethical values, it fits my environmental values, and it makes me feel healthy. So those are like three major boxes that I just ticked off. I don't totally have a huge problem with people eating meat. It's basically industrial agriculture that I don’t agree with. It's messing up communities. It's really messing up our rivers. It's messing up oceans, it’s a major component of deforestation. You know, like, we have meat when you go to the store and it's being dyed red and pumped with drugs. It’s so gross.

So, when you made this switch did it affect your weight?

So I was around 165lbs, I’m 5’10 and I lost 8 lbs straight away, but that wasn’t the right weight to lose and so I put that back on through training and got to like 161lbs where I am now and I feel really good.

Since switching to a plant based diet my body's ability to go longer is crazy and if I take a break my body recovers way faster. If I work out, like, wow, I'm so dusted. But an hour later I can go and run, and then after that I can go mountain bike. I’m an active 26 year-old and I look back, you know, I really wasn't eating that much in terms of nutrients. There are so many things that you are missing on with a standard American diet.

There is such a lack of information. Like in winter, when people get the flu I always tell people you should probably drink some tea with ginger and lemon and cloves of garlic and like, crush it down and just drink that down with some honey.

I know!  And people freak out, right? But then they are happy to go down the meds aisle and down some Nyquil, no questions asked. As a society we are so unhealthy and then you start mixing in big pharma from the US. I mean, it's crazy how much of the drugs made in the US goes to animals, instead of humans. I'm not saying it should go to people instead but they’re pumping drugs into these animals to really make them edible and that scared the shit out of me pretty much.

Do people ever give you a hard time about being plant based?

I think that comes from a super reasonable point of view because I definitely clowned-on people for being vegan before. But for me, it's not so much being vegan, but more the industrial agriculture part of the whole thing that I’m against.  It’s just ethical for me.

‘every day three times a day I choose life,’

I guess completely changing your diet can be a huge step for most people, especially when you’ve been brought up to consider eating meat to be normal?

I think a lot of that has a lot to do with it because people aren't willing to literally uproot their entire life and challenge this stuff.

I think it’s like Yoga, can you commit to seven days. Can you commit to 30 days? If you break it down into those chunks it becomes way easier.

Everything is possible. It's just rewiring your brain and just saying, I can do this instead of I don't want to do that. I’m trying to have this influence everything now.  I’m always in talks with my sponsors on how we can make more sustainable product, it’s something that is a huge task but if you start with certain smaller ideas and work from there… all of the sudden you are on your way to a better product for consumers and for out planet

As a snowboarder there is always this hypocrisy about ‘doing good,’ since we harm the environment through our travel, how do you balance that yourself?

For sure, it’s like, let's just take a step back and look at what we are doing to our planet. And no, no one's perfect, but we can do things every day, you know. I kind of live by the mantra of that, ‘every day, three times a day I choose life,’ and for me that's enough. I don't want to consume death, you know.  Animal agriculture is the single biggest thing you can personally do to combat climate change.  So, I know every day I am helping in some way, it motivates me to become more and more sustainable every day!

That's powerful.  So last year you won Rider of the Year and Video Part of the Year, pretty much the most coveted titles in snowboarding. You already have the Olympic Gold sat on your mantelpiece. How much did this change impact your riding?

You know, for a long time after the Olympics everyone expected so much of me, but this lit a fire under my ass, like, what you can do on a mental scale and it's scary. So not to be cocky, but I'm one of the best snowboarders and this helped me go into winter single minded, thinking I'm going to be better than everyone else. I think it's probably part mental and part what you're eating. 

You know Kelly Slater, I don't think he's fully plant based all the time, but I know he eats very well. I don't know what his deal is, but look at him. He isn’t going to McDonald's, you know. He's 47 years old, he's still on the tour. You can't tell me that he isn’t one of the greatest athletes of all time.

All Photos : Aaron Blatt