By SCOTTY JAMES' EYES are closed as he sits in the grooming chair at Esquire’s photoshoot in Sydney’s inner-city Alexandria. A makeup artist is dabbing around his eyes with concealer, blocking my view, so I watch the halfpipe snowboarding star in the mirror and wonder what he might be visualising in his mind’s eye as he talks about the extreme nature of his sport.
“You have to live on the edge of being uncomfortable 95 per cent of the time,” James’ reflection says. “But I’m comfortable with what I’m doing because I practise it, I train and I’m very methodical in my approach. So, I give myself every opportunity not to feel like it’s a life and death situation every time. But I don’t ever feel like I can’t control my emotion in that moment and put it in its place to be able to perform.”
I duly ask James what was happening behind his eyelids as he spoke. Where was he mentally? At the top of a halfpipe? Barrelling through the air, 20 feet above hard-packed ice?
“I was thinking about the margin for error,” says the 31-year-old, who’s here today in partnership with luxury apparel brand Tommy Hilfiger. “Margin for error in the halfpipe is like, well, there isn’t any really. It’s a 22-to-23-foot-high wall. It’s sheet ice. It’s like concrete if you’re a second too early or you’re a second too late. Both have significant consequences from a crashing perspective. So, I was thinking about the timing. When you go up the wall, you’ve got to have perfect timing to initiate tricks so that it goes right. That’s what I was thinking about actually.”
When the makeup artist finishes and James’ cobalt eyes level you with a crinkled smile, the effect is both disarming and, honestly, a little jarring. It’s a struggle to imagine this easy-going fellow, all languid of voice and impossibly laid-back, striving to push himself to within a hair’s breadth of peril, in pursuit of glory.
For that failure of the imagination we might be forgiven, though, for unlike his competitors and his family, who’ve supported him all the way from the suburban streets of Melbourne’s Warrandyte to the very top of his sport, we are yet to meet ‘Mooki’.
A HALF-HOUR or so later, James is dressed in a Tommy Hilfiger crewneck sweater with tailored shorts, his hair sharply slicked back. As he waits for the photographer to change his lens for the next shot, I catch him singing along to the Stones’ classic ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name,” he mouths along, as internally I do the hack thing and wonder if those lyrics might invoke Mooki.
So, who’s Mooki? The endearing, childish and intimate nature of the moniker perhaps offers a clue to his identity. It’s James’ childhood nickname, bestowed upon him by his dad to encourage his son to dream big and shoot for the moon. Over time, it would become James’ alter ego, the flipside of his amicable public persona, the Batman to his Bruce Wayne. Mooki generally comes out when James finds himself at the top of a halfpipe, moments before he’s about to drop in.
“It definitely switches on,” he says. “I’m two different people. When I compete I kind of flip a switch to be a character that wants to be a very fierce, cold-blooded competitor. And then when it’s done, I’m a little bit more happy-go-lucky. Being able to switch between those two personalities works really well for me.”
Mooki, who if he hadn’t also now become a children’s book character, is someone you might refer to – at least in the macho parlance of competitive sport – as a mother*cker. Most people don’t detect even a hint of his presence behind James’ sunny demeanour. And, as all great competitive athletes do, James hastens to add that he’s “competitive with myself”.
To say Mooki works well is perhaps an understatement given that James has won seven X Games gold medals in the superpipe, including four in a row, and earlier this year became the first man to win four world championships in the halfpipe. Mooki also played his part in the bronze and silver medals James won at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018 and Beijing in 2022, respectively. And you can bet he’ll be right there as James seeks to add the missing piece to his “pool room collection” and finally claim gold at Milano Cortina 2026 in Italy, in February.
“Mooki, to this day, is a character that I embrace to be that person to win or overcome challenges and step up when things aren’t going well,” says James. “The great things you see on TV or on social media when you win, it’s the Mooki character that got me there rather than the Scotty James that you see standing on top of the podium.”
It’s likely we’ll see more of Mooki in James’ upcoming documentary, the aptly titled, Pipe Dream – yes, we stole it for our headline – which the snowboarder describes as a career “tell-all”.
“I mean it’s right on the nose,” laughs James of the doco’s title. “I’ve never gone into depth about my story as an Australian snowboarder. It’s obviously very outside the box. We [Aussies] are few and far between in the mountains and I’m very proud of that.”
James admits that taking viewers behind the curtain of his career and life off the slopes is daunting. “It’s very revealing and there’s not much left out. I think that being in sport, people don’t ever know someone unless you know them. You never really see someone’s character.” You never really see Mooki.
A LITTLE LATER in the shoot, James is photographed with a couple of smartly dressed boys as part of Tommy Hilfiger’s Father’s Day campaign. His own son, Leo, was born nine months ago. Becoming a father, James says, has provided him with a “time stamp”, his son’s growth and development helping yank him into the present moment.
“Seeing him [Leo] grow I realise how fast time is going by and he’s always a good reminder to me to make sure I’m staying present and enjoying every moment,” he says. “And not only just for my life as a dad, but also my life in sport. It’s been an amazing, amazing first nine months.”
He mentions being present again when I ask what kind of dad he’d like to be. As any dad these days knows, in an age of phones and screens, the struggle to be attentive and engaging is real, even more so for an athlete who’s travelling the globe, attending shoots and has as much on his plate as James does. He’d also like to be a fun dad, he says, a consistent one and, in terms of the values he instils in his son, a role model. But it all starts with being present.
Being where you are – in the moment – is probably something you can apply to snowboarding, or any pastime that requires complete and unwavering concentration to succeed. In the pipe, fear and the danger will do a lot of the work for you – a 20-foot drop onto ice that has the molecular properties of cement has a way of snapping you right into the here and now.
And ironically, it’s by fully inhabiting the moment that you have the power to create something timeless – be it a jaw-dropping run that stays with all who witnessed it and maybe even finds a second life on YouTube downloads, or even in creating an arresting image that lives on, as James is doing here today with Tommy. To wit, during the shoot I catch him sitting on the floor between shots, a Tommy shirt and tailored shorts casting him as an idle schoolboy, daydreaming perhaps, about new tricks he might take to the slopes.
Seeing Leo grow I realise how fast time is going by. It’s a good reminder to make sure I’m staying present”
On the subject of moments or objects that endure, James points out that some of Tommy’s classic pieces – the iconic Polo shirt and the brand’s legendary denim line, for example – exist beyond the whims of the zeitgeist, as entrenched cultural artefacts. “I mean, even just talking about being timeless – Tommy jeans, the traditional crew necks and all that stuff just live forever,” he says.
Theres a correlation, he adds, between his own career ethos and Tommy’s core values of passion, dedication and drive – tenets epitomised, not least, by the brand’s founder. “I’ve been fortunate enough many times now to sit down with Tommy Hilfiger himself for dinner and I think passion would be the word I would use to summarise him as a character, not only for his endeavours for the brand and what he’s created, but for his lifestyle and his family.”
Tommy, of course, has a long association with F1, a sport close to James’ heart. His wife Chloe’s father, Lawrence Stroll, is the team owner of Aston Martin and James is good mates with Aussie star Daniel Ricciardo, another athlete who, behind a continent-spanning smile, is as competitive as they come in any sport you’d care to name.
Like snowboarding, F1 is an inherently perilous sport and James sympathises with Chloe, who has to watch both from the sidelines. “Chloe always says my sport is harder to watch because it’s 30 seconds of real intensity that’s incredibly dangerous every single time, whereas in F1, once they kind of get through the first turns, you can relax a little bit. Poor Chloe, she’s on her toes 365 days a year because the F1 season finishes and I start. We keep our families on our toes full time.”
JAMES ARRIVED BACK in Australia from his home in Monaco just two days before our shoot, spending a night at his childhood home in Melbourne’s Warrandyte, where he’ll be for most of the Aussie winter. I ask if his bedroom has changed much?
He smiles. “It’s still the same, still has my clothes in it.”
He describes himself as a challenging kid for his parents, one with prodigious energy and a proclivity for risk. “I was always outside building a jump on anything that I could ride my bike or my scooter or my skateboard off.”
He’s thankful his parents embraced his adventurous streak and allowed him to take risks. “I don’t think I’d be where I am now if my parents didn’t embrace who I was as a person.”
As boyishly handsome as James looks today in Tommy garb, it’s worth noting that, at 31, he’s a veteran in his sport. He left the family home as an 11-year-old and has been on the circuit for most of his life. In those early years he often travelled with his mum, while his dad was at home working and looking after the rest of the family – older brothers Tim and Sean and sister Rebecca. Being away from them, James admits now, was tougher than he sometimes let on.
The elephant in the room is the winter games gold medal. It’s my North Star”
He recalls feeling jealous of the Europeans and Americans on the circuit who could turn to their families when things weren’t going well. “All I’d want to do is be with my family because they knew how to pick me up and put me back on my feet. But I didn’t always have that.”
He was also conscious of the financial burden his parents bore in supporting his fledgling career, adding to the pressure he felt to succeed. “At every turn it always felt like if I didn’t do as well as anticipated, you’d feel like you were letting everyone down.”
Many of us remember James as the smiling, fresh-faced 15-year-old kid competing at the Vancouver Olympics way back in 2010. While the Games was undoubtedly a thrilling experience, it was a lot for a teenager to handle, he says now. “When you watch on TV you go, Wow, how incredible. It was incredible. But at the time I didn’t love snowboarding. I was struggling with it a lot. I was just very insecure and not where I probably should have been professionally.”
James has gone on to have a glorious career. He’s easily the most decorated Australian snowboarder of all time, yet conspicuously absent from his trophy cabinet is the greatest prize of all. “The elephant in the room for me is obviously the winter Games gold medal,” he acknowledges. “It’s definitely my North Star.”
James’ longevity in the sport has meant that some of his former rivals, most notably the sport’s GOAT, Shaun White, have moved on. But in the Flying Tomato’s absence, a contingent of Japanese snowboarders has stepped in, dominating the sport in recent years. “They’re an absolute force,” says James of his three main rivals, Ayumu Hirano, Ruka Hirano and Yuto Totsuka. “If you want to see me competitive, watch me in a room when those three are in my vicinity; that’s when you’ll see me competitive. Being in a halfpipe final, under the lights, it definitely makes me want to shut the door and let them know that I’m going to win. That’s the opportunity. You don’t say it, you just do it.”
It was Ayumu Hirano who shut the door on James at Beijing in 2022, pipping him with a breathtaking final run. Hirano had landed a triple cork, a trick never performed before in competition, in his first run and repeated the feat twice in his final run.
“On the day he [Hirano] was just better,” says James. “That’s competition. It’s what I love about it and it’s what I hate about it as well. This will be my fifth time [at an Olympics] and I’ve left no stone unturned in the preparation so that if it comes down to it again, I’m going to be the one on top, not behind. I’ll do my best to make that happen.”
James’ eyes are open as he speaks, but I have a feeling when I meet them in the mirror, that this time it’s Mooki who’s staring back at me.
Photography: Georges Antoni
Styling: Grant Pearce
