Mia Brookes at Winter Olympics 2026: Soundtrack to her snowboarding life key for the Team GB phenom
Metallica gets Mia Brookes motivated for training
“I just get up in the morning and listen to Metallica and go snowboarding,” Brookes told Olympics.com in 2023. “That’s about it!” Collecting medals is almost incidental though when they do come, Brookes is happy about it. Mostly.
“I’ll exchange the (crystal) globe for 4 black sabbath tickets,” said Brookes, joking on Instagram after being crowned the overall World Cup Big Air champion in the 2023-24 season.
Brookes’ talent was spotted early, joining the GB Snowsport programme at aged 10 having been schooled in snowboarding from 18 months old at both the indoor Kidsgrove Ski Centre in Stoke-on-Trent where her grandparents worked.
“My grandad died a long time ago, but my granny is still around and still loving it,” said Brookes to MailOnline in February last year. “She has never watched me compete live, but she is planning to come out to the Olympics, which will be really sweet.”
School holidays were spent with her parents in the mountains in resorts around Europe, particularly Chamonix, France. ‘Three hippies in a motorhome’ was how their friends fondly described the family.
“The motorhome was like a second home to me,” said Brookes. “I loved being in the mountains and riding around with my mum and dad. We were never setting out to try and get to this level, we just loved snowboarding as a family, and it has led me to where I am now.”
Aged 11, Brookes competed at the national championships for the first time, and two years after that, in 2020, made her international debut finishing second in a Europa Cup.
Four years later and Brookes became the youngest-ever snowboard world champion, winning slopestyle gold at Bakuriani 2023, aged just 16.
The first Briton to win a snowboard slopestyle world title, Brookes needed to land a history-making Cab 1440, the first woman to do so, to beat fellow phenom Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, the Beijing 2022 Olympic slopestyle champion and big air silver medallist from New Zealand. Brookes also had to overcome Japan’s Miyabi Onitsuka, the 2015 world champion.
And yet Brookes is keen to point out that there’s a lot going on behind the social media showcase.
