Markus Kleveland

Snowboarding aficionados will know Norway’s Markus Kleveland as the first snowboarder to land a Quad Cork 1800 in competition. The audacious move — which involves catapulting yourself off a 110-foot-high ramp, pulling off four off-axis flips and five full spins, and then landing upright on your board at around 50 mph — has only ever been completed by a handful of people. And Kleveland is in that elite group.

Clearly, Markus Kleveland is one of the best snowboarders in the world— it even comes up as soon as you Google his name! In five years, he has won an insane 10 X Games medals (six gold, four silver) in the Knuckle Huck, Slopestyle, and Big Air competitions. He also took slopestyle gold and big air bronze at the 2021 World Championships in Aspen. In addition to this, he has recently finished competing in his second Olympic games. Not bad for a young guy in his early 20s! He has also become popular on social media, with over 666,000 Instagram followers and 58,000 YouTube subscribers.

Kleveland was born in 1999 in Lillehammer, a town with big winter-sports heritage — it hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics and 2016 Winter Youth Olympics and has also bred other Olympic medal winners. He turned pro when he was just 13 years old and quickly set about making an impact on the sport. In 2016, he started to get noticed after winning various international events. In 2017, he won his first X Games gold and was the overall winner of the Big Air competition on the Air + Style tour. The rest, as they say…