Team USA snowboarder Maddie Mastro is in Italy with the ultimate goal of reaching the top of the Olympic podium — but going viral along the way has been an added bonus.
Mastro, 25, advanced to the women’s snowboarding halfpipe final at the 2026 Winter Olympics with a third place finish in qualifying on Wednesday, February 11.
During her time in Milano Cortina, Mastro has been sharing frequent updates via TikTok with her more than 640,000 followers. “Finals here we come, thank you everyone who tuned in. Let’s run it again tomorrow,” she posted shortly after she came off the slopes on Wednesday.
In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly before the Games, Mastro reflected on her TikTok account exploding in popularity during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
“I enjoy content creation,” she said. “I enjoy consuming and being a participant in social media. I enjoy scrolling, so it’s cool to maybe contribute to someone else’s feed. I enjoy being a part of all of these different worlds that social media has allowed to be in. It’s pretty cool.”
Mastro added, “I must be doing something right.”
Now at the Olympics for the third time, Mastro acknowledged that being one of the faces of Team USA has been a bit of an adjustment.
“It’s a crazy thought,” she said. “It’s the biggest stage for sport and you do feel that. There’s a lot of media attention around it. It’s hard not to feel the effects that the platform of the Olympics has, the mass scale of it. You definitely feel everyone watching.”
With so many new eyes on snowboarding during the Olympics, Mastro joked that she’s sometimes reminded of how unique her lifestyle can be.
“My day-to-day is so normalized because it’s just my normal,” Mastro explained. “I’m always like, ‘I don’t know what’s weird about it.’ And then I end up talking to somebody about my day and they’re like, ‘Oh that’s kind of weird, dude. That’s kind of crazy that you do that.’”
Mastro continued, “The fact that we travel so much is a pretty crazy thing. We’re constantly traveling and finding snow and chasing snow. A lot of people are like, ‘Where do you ride most in the winter?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, we actually travel most of the year from contest to contest.’ It’s hard to have a home base where we are for a long period of time. We’re always on the move.”
Mastro, a native of Wrightwood, California, admitted that her on-the-go schedule can sometimes make the feeling of stability quite elusive — but it can also have the reverse effect.
“Sometimes you’re in one place for a long period of time and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I gotta leave,’” Mastro said with a laugh. “‘Like, we gotta do something. I’m getting stir crazy. We gotta go. We need a trip. I need to go do something.’”
She added, “It makes the time at home more valuable. You get to enjoy the moments when you slow down and you get to do nothing.”
Mastro competes in the women’s halfpipe final on Thursday, February 12.
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