Maria Thomsen is admittedly oblivious about how the snowboard industry works. But Maria happens to be way better than most at snowboarding without really trying. She’s an anomaly and she doesn’t even know it. She doesn’t see herself as a female snowboarder. She doesn’t compare herself to others. She just maintains laser focus on her own unique goals.

Maria didn’t learn to ride until she was an adult, and battled through several heavy injuries her first couple of years on snow. But she kept pushing forward, having a baby in 2014, the first year she ever filmed a video part. By 2018, she’d won TransWorld’s female video part of the year and been invited to compete in X Games Real Snow, the first woman to do so. 

Despite her skills on snow, Maria doesn’t pay her bills with sponsorship deals, but rather by working a blue-collar job to support herself and her son, Tao, who is now 5 years old. She makes it work. When Tao was a baby, Maria was pumping breast milk at street spots in subzero temperatures. Last winter, when she accepted that X Games Real Snow invite, she fractured her hip during the first week of shooting. After five stressful weeks off trying to heal, she battled through pain and pressure to scrap together a part that became the contest’s Fan Favorite runner-up. Most people that voted didn’t know that Maria had a fraction of the time to film compared with the five men she was competing against…

Buy issue

Subscribe to start your collection of The Snowboarder’s Journal.