Now that we’ve worked through the challenges of getting into our video call, Sandra Hillen Rodriguez is absolutely beaming. She’s at home in Breckenridge, Colorado. Her long, dark hair draped over her shoulders, big curls like spring-loaded coils of energy. The tuque suggests playfulness while her energy suggests contentment.
Sandra has big news, and delivers it straight away, revealing the inspiration for the euphoric vibe she brought to the call.
“We just got something like 27 inches of snow. I went today and it was unbelievable. It was so fun.”
Fun. It’s the reason the Overland Park, Kansas, native originally took to the sport. It was the reason she adopted a post-collegiate lifestyle that included more snow and less corporate bureaucracy.
Then there’s another word — fearlessness — as she climbed the snowboarding ranks as part of a new breed. In the late aughts, slopestyle burst onto the scene, attracting the more creative riders. Rails and jumps, combined with speed and gumption, found its way into the Winter X Games, the trendsetting event of its era for sports, style and culture.
Sandra, who had an early fascination with snowboarding, turned her passion into a historic run that almost landed her in the Olympics. [Alamy photos]
Sandra was among those enamored with the sassy new way of riding. It looked fun. She was already obsessed with the sport. But what she didn’t know then, right after graduating college in 2007, was that this new wave would take her on the ride of her life.
For a kid from Kansas who spent her summers on the beaches of Mexico with her mother’s family, this was all she wanted — foregoing potential opportunities to play college basketball for a sport she didn’t even try until her late teens.
This ride would take her to the edge of the Olympic movement, and nearly around the world, where elite riders would set the tempo and etch the benchmarks.
But before all of that, she had to learn how to turn on 150 vertical feet at a tiny hill in Missouri known as Snow Creek.
Sandra agrees that parts of her journey sound — what’s the right word here? — unreasonable. Snowboarding isn’t something synonymous with growing up near Kansas City.
“Yeah, it wasn’t a great place to try to pursue that. For me, I started learning from a video game, Cool Boarders 2 on PlayStation. I just got super into it and became obsessed with snowboarding. I was buying magazines back then and just learning as much as I could even though I wasn’t doing it.”
Next, she starting consuming videos. Among the first was True Life (2001). This further revved her desire.
“It’s a classic, and I had no idea what tricks they were even doing. I just knew I loved it and I loved watching it. So before I even put my feet in a snowboard, I was just enamored with that whole culture.”
Around this time, she managed to coerce her parents into a family snowboarding trip to Colorado. The destination was meant to be Winter Park, but when they arrived, the enormity of the resort’s terrain overwhelmed them. With 3,000 skiable acres and a summit elevation of 12,060 feet, they begged off.
“We looked at the mountain and we were like, ‘This mountain is way too hard for us.’ We didn’t realize there’s like (beginner runs). So we ended up driving to Silver Creek. I just put on my snowboard and all I did was fall and I loved it.”
With passion’s wick burning bright, she returned to Overland Park and managed to get hired at Snow Creek during her senior year of high school.
“I could barely connect turns, but they’re like, ‘Yeah, you can kind of make turns, you’re a snowboard instructor.’”
As someone who started snowboarding late in high school, her World Cup results were nothing short of impressive. [Courtesy photos]
If there was any doubt whether she was hooked, driving to the tiny ski hill after school while planning trips to Colorado was how she spent her time. She became such a convert that the basketball, soccer and cross country standout made a choice even she didn’t see coming.
“My senior year I was going on a snowboard trip, and I had been waiting for this, and I was going to miss soccer tryouts because of it. My coach said I had to come to tryouts and I was like, ‘You’ve seen me play for three years.’ So I got to skip tryouts, I got the snowboard trip and then he’s like, ‘You got to choose.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, it’s snowboarding.’"
Sandra proceeded to drop her other sports as well, conceding she may be passing on a chance to play college basketball. Instead, she enrolled at the University of Colorado and, as she joyfully says now, “that’s truly where my snowboarding journey began.”
Her Instagram handle is @_hurricanesandy. When I inquire about its origins, it involves a bar at Government Camp, Oregon, a summer snowboarding camp, and maybe some karaoke. Whatever it was, she liked the moniker enough to keep it. As it turned out, the force-of-nature descriptor projected the next decade of her life, one filled with turbulence and tailwinds both within and beyond her control.
Prior to earning such a cool nickname, Sandra arrived at CU in the fall of 2003. Here, she finally found her tribe. She joined the club snowboarding team and soaked in the atmosphere. Every day, she was surrounded by riders who were just as stoked as she was. She watched and learned, realizing that the best way to get better was throw herself into the fire.
And boy, was that fire hot. The aspiring film major says she was “getting better quick. I was an unknown girl my freshman year and then by my junior year I was starting to do better at contests.”
She was also getting humbled on occasion. At Eldora Mountain outside of Boulder, for example.
“My first rail jam I ever did was at Eldora. I had never hit a rail before. And I'm like, ‘I'm going to enter this rail jam because it will make me get a rail.’ And, I'm just watching some of the girls. And one of the girls — who I actually snowboarded with today — I watched her do it. I was like, ‘Okay, I got this.’”
Narrator: But, she didn’t.
“I mean, I totally taco-ed the first time I hit this rail. I fell so hard and then because I just didn't know anything, you know, just going clueless, I had this desire to learn and understand and didn't care how hard it was going to be to get there.”
Upon graduation, she had a decision to make: stick with the lifestyle, as many do in the their early 20s, or get a real job and start real life in the real world.
“Right around then, I got a job at Cascade Snowboard Camp in the summer. That was kind of like this mecca of getting more into the snowboard culture.
“And that way I could snowboard year-round because that’s how I knew I would get better. That's when everything started to change for me.”
Two years after graduating from CU, two important events transpired that would change Sandra’s trajectory. First, she was getting infinitely better. Sponsors noticed. Bigger events offered invitations. Then, as slopestyle grew more popular, there was talk of adding it to the Olympics in 2014.
This was the door to another dimension.
“I started getting (sponsor) help and then I was able to travel to these bigger contests, meet more people and kind of network that way. And, push myself to ride bigger features and bigger stuff.
“And then Snowboard magazine used to have this event called Ms Superpark where they would build a giant snowboard park and it'd be at different locations. And they would do a four-day photoshoot and film shoot. And that was really huge because that was kind of the progression of women's snowboarding at the time. And I got invited.
“If you got an invite, it was a big deal. And then you’re just working your butt off to get those photos and get noticed in a magazine and do whatever you can to push your limits every day.”
At this point, she’s just enjoying the ride. She’s living a dream, really, and she knows it. Yet the shelf life on dreams like this can expire rather quick.
It’s now 2011 or 2012 — she isn’t quite sure which one — but she’s back at Government Camp, working an adult snowboard camp. One of the campers asked her if she was going to try for the Olympics now that slopestyle was an official event.
“This guy, he’s like, ‘Are you going to try to get in?’ And I was like, ‘The U.S. team is just so, so tough and it's very expensive. Plus it's just hard.’”
While flattered, Sandra knew the U.S. team was already stacked. Those riders had been on boards since they were in elementary school. She didn’t see a viable path that way, so she tried to close the conversation. In jest, she offered, “Who am I going to compete for? Mexico?”
That’s when this adult camper delivered the classic I know a guy line.
“The guy was like, ‘I know this guy who's starting the Mexican snowboard team.’ And I'm like, ‘You're joking.' I think he's just pulling my chain, you know?”
Sandra told him to have “the guy” call her.
“And then the next day I get a phone call.”
In a matter of months, Sandra found herself on this unlikely path of potentially competing for Mexico at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. A lightning bolt exploded, displacing a gigaton of red tape. The guy was legit. Mexico was being recognized as a viable competitor, and the girl from Kansas who spent summers with her mother’s family in Mexico was now looking at a new reality that involved Rev Tours, which led to the World Cup circuit, which meant international travel to compete against the world’s best.
“I couldn't believe it. I get a phone call when I'm on the lift at Ms Superpark. And it was Alberto de la Roca. And he was like, ‘Hey, we got the money. You're flying to Europe next week.’ And then I'm like, ‘oh my god.’
“I was so pumped. And there was this giant channel gap jump at this super park that everyone was scared to hit. And I'm like, ‘I gotta hit this because I gotta get ready, you know?’ So, my knees are shaking and I just drop in and hit this channel gap and everything went fine. I was either going to get broken or I'm going to prove to myself that I'm ready to do that stuff.”
What happened next was a whirlwind of highs and lows, of pride and achievement, of devastating loss and sadness. On the World Cup tour, Sandra found the learning curve higher than at any point in her journey. But she scraped and clawed her way into the conversation.
With such a short window — basically a year-and-a-half — before the 2014 Olympics, earning enough points to rise in the rankings was going to be difficult. She had a handful of top 30 finishes — impressive on its own — but couldn’t crack the code. Sochi wasn’t in the cards.
Fueled by her rapid ascent in the sport and the confidence that she could compete at the World Cup level, she set her sights on Pyeongchang, South Korea and the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. En route, she amassed impressive finishes. Seven top 20 results, including winning the South American Cup in Argentina.
She’s feeling good. She’s doing the math after every event. She’s among the 50 best riders in the world.
"But you have to be in that top 30 to get that Olympic spot.”
For the first time on our call, I can see her disappointment. That energy she brought earlier has faded. She’s sunk into her chair a bit, reliving how close the kid from Kansas came to competing for her mother’s home country in the Olympic Games. She’s still smiling, but there’s a barrier now as the memories returned her to an unfulfilling ending.
“So I had just missed it … I missed it,” her voice now trailing in reflection. “So I miss South Korea, which was pretty devastating. I worked really hard. I had some good results. But you feel like a failure. You've been working toward this and dedicating your life and then just to have it kind of slip away.”
In the fierce crosswinds of competition, where mentally you must possess blinders to the noise, the big picture is always right there, like sitting in the front row at the movies. Staring up at the giant screen, what’s real and what’s possible is so close you can reach out and touch it. It’s literally all you can see. That was her immediate future.
But if you move to the back row of the theater, you’re able to better appreciate the tapestry in full. For Sandra, after the 2018 season and following two consecutive bitter ends to the Olympic pursuit, she found herself in that back row, no longer looking at the immediate pursuit. Instead, the wholeness of a life not yet lived was creeping into her conscience.
“I got to a point where I started thinking about the risk,” she says. “Sometimes it's a life-altering injury. I wanted to be able to still snowboard and run in the summer and do athletic things and not, you know, change my life forever.”
Sandra and her partner welcomed a daughter, Sofia Joy, who has already checked snowboarding off her list. [Courtesy photos]
She was able to retire from competitive snowboarding on her terms, which is all any athlete can ask. And when that happened, the next act in her personal movie unfolded. She married her partner, Michaela Sakumura. They had a baby, Sofia Joy Hillen Sakumura, 15 months ago (yes, she’s already been snowboarding). She’s working as a film editor and she’s still carving turns on the mountain and catching air in the terrain park.
There’s the role model she’s become. The Mexican heritage she embraced. The family that loves her and the values that have stayed true. She has shown what’s possible for so many.
It’s all there on her Instagram feed. Her progression as an athlete. And as a human. There, a tidy collection of squares serves as a visual timeline of her life. She’s still @_hurricanesandy. Just watch one of her reels and you’ll see why.
Matthew Fults is author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel, The Scotland Project, available from your favorite bookseller.
