'What's it going to take?': Scotty James has one huge goal outside the Olympics but Australia's not ready to let him achieve it

LIVIGNO: Scotty James is desperate to win an Olympic Games gold medal but there's an even more rewarding goal he hopes to achieve before he finishes his career as a professional snowboarder.

The trouble is, right now Australia isn't doing its bit.

"So, I think my goal would be, before I hang the boots up, is I'd love to compete in front of my country, in Australia," James told a packed press conference in Livigno on Saturday.

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The good news hidden within that comment is that James doesn't sound like a man contemplating retirement, despite the fact that he's about to compete in his fifth Olympic Games and has now been travelling the professional halfpipe circuit for 16 years.

That longevity and the fact that a gold medal at Milano Cortina 2026 would complete the set has led to speculation that this might be the end of the road for one of the most dominant athletes in snow sports.

In an engaging 35-minute press conference that covered plenty of ground, James sounded very much like a man who won't let conventional thinking dictate how he finishes his career.

But there was bad news too. While James is in Italy in pursuit of his long-held ambition of winning an Olympic gold medal, the goal that could drive him beyond Milano Cortina 2026 is currently unachievable.

As of now, Australia doesn't have a halfpipe capable of hosting elite-level professional events - a fact that becomes more galling when you learn that 16-year-old Aussie prodigy Indra Brown regularly flies to New Zealand to train on a competition-level halfpipe in Cardrona.

Already, James has been making it his mission to lift the standard of facilities in Australia and he's made some big steps.

Up until two years ago Australia didn't even have a suitable training halfpipe. That changed when James partnered with park builder Charles Beckinsale to build a full-size training pipe in Thredbo, which opened in 2024.

It's a leap in the right direction, with James now able to do training blocks at home and young aspiring snowboarders able to graduate from a nearby mini pipe.

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"It's the first time ever in my career where I've been able to actually snowboard in a 22-foot pipe in our backyard," James said.

"It was amazing to be able to do that and be so close to what I was familiar with when I was growing up. I think it's also cool that we have a group of young, talented skiers and snowboarders in Australia who were able to see it first hand. Most of them would look at it and go 'hell no', which I totally understand. Which is why we built the mini park as well, a mini park at Thredbo where kids can have more fun and it's a good introduction into a big pipe as well.

"It's amazing to be training amongst the gum trees, which is obviously unique. It's (halfpipe snowboarding) taken me overseas, travelling the world, which I'm grateful for, but when you're young it's a big commitment from your family and from yourself to leave home so young and have to go overseas to be able to do the discipline.

"So it was really great to have that at Thredbo and big respect to Thredbo for thinking about the future and the kids because they see the prospect there as well."

To understand James' mission to make it easier for Australian kids to pursue a snowboarding career at home, you only have to flick on Netflix and watch the fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows his journey from his early teenage years.

Now 31, the snowboarding megastar has lived and trained away from home for most of his life, after his family made the monumental decision to pack his bags and send him on the road as a 13-year-old in pursuit of his dream.

It was at times a tortuous journey, with James struggling to stay happy, focused and motivated while his close-knit family was on the other side of the world.

But for James and many other talented Aussie teenagers, there has never really been another option. Either live out of a suitcase away from family and friends to try to forge a career in elite snow sports or stay home, let the dream fizz out and live with the 'what ifs'.

Any way you slice it, it's a brutal choice. For every Scotty James, Val Guseli and Indra Brown there's countless other stories of Australian teens chasing endless winters away from their support networks only to run out of puff and quit.

So rather than visualising an Olympic gold medal as his ultimate legacy piece, James is stretching himself to think bigger and try to have a more lasting impact on Australian snowboarding.

James hints that the shiny new training halfpipe at Thredbo might be just the beginning of his efforts to reshape the way Australians think about snowboarding.

So, what will it take to convince the people who need to be convinced to take the last significant step that needs to be taken to help James realise his dream of competing at home?

"What's it going to take? I've been asking myself that question actually," he said.

"Look, I think the training pipe is actually quite good, you can do a lot in a training pipe. Typically at that time of the year you're usually working on one hits (one trick per run), not doing full runs.

"For them to pull the snow together, it really comes down to the conditions. You've got to have the snow, you've got to have the infrastructure to make it happen. Charles Beckinsale is doing that, which is amazing and Thredbo are giving him the platform to do it and trying to help us athletes realise our goals on the hill.

"I think [competing in Australia] would most likely to be through an event like X-Games, which I hope could happen, and doing it there at Thredbo and having, competing, not just for me, but for Indra, for Valentino, for Tess Coady, the list goes on, for all these athletes who spend so much time away from Australia to compete, which is a blessing, but it would be amazing and probably the most rewarding thing for me to do in my career is to watch all of them and myself compete in front of a home crowd, it'd be awesome.

"We'll see how we go, that's a big rock to move uphill, but I do think it's possible and I look forward to hopefully making it happen."