Mia Brookes: Metal And Medals
By Colin Bane
Mia Brookes has goals. “My first year in Aspen didn’t go the way I wanted, so since then I’ve been waking up every day just blasting music and manifesting: I’m gonna win X Games this year! Everyone’s going down!” she says. “I’ve got nothing against anyone, I just want the gold!”
The 17-year-old’s confidence is hardly misplaced — Brookes has bolstered her credentials significantly in the year since XG Aspen 2023. In February, she captured the FIS World Championships slopestyle title in a major upset thanks to the first 1440 landed by a woman in a contest.She also won the 2023 FIS Crystal Globe for overall Big Air points.
“It was definitely a hectic year,” Brookes says. “Some things that happened for me in 2023, including my first X Games invitation, were things I grew up thinking would take my whole career to achieve,” grew up taking an unusual path to a snowboard career.
A native of Sandbach, England (complete with a thick Chesire accent), she rode at indoor ski domes near her home. But Brookes admits “grew up riding at indoor ski domes” is a vast understatement. Her parents, Victoria and Nigel, met in the 1990s while they both were working in Chamonix, France, to finance their snowboarding adventures. For two decades before Mia was born, her parents spent their winters living out of a small camper van to chase powder in the Alps. Mia got on a board before her 2nd birthday, and the family upgraded to a 6-wheel motorhome and kept at it.
“It was just the cheapest way to do it, so we’d live in the motorhome for most of the season,” Mia says. “It’s not quite as spacious as the apartment-sized RVs in America. It’s nice and cozy!”
She took to the sport immediately and has made major strides in the past couple of years. The secret to her new medal-collecting superpower? Metal. Heavy metal, played loud. Metallica. Black Sabbath. Megadeth. AC/DC. All of it. But especially Metallica — Ride the Lightning is her favorite album. Her pick of the six guitars she has collected and plays is the Gibson Flying V, made legendary by Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield. She says her next snowboarding dream after winning X Games gold is to release a full snowboard video part set to the instrumental track “Orion” from Master of Puppets.
Mia Brookes Bio Blast
| Age 17. She’s the youngest in the field in Women’s SBD Slopestyle, Knuckle Huck and Big Air and second-youngest overall at X Games Aspen 2024. |
| Aspen 2024 is her second X Games appearance (6th in Slopestyle at XG Aspen 2023). |
| Won the BBC’s Young Sports Personality of the Year in December and The Sunday Times’ Young Sportswoman of the Year in November. |
| Gold in Aspen would make her the second snowboarder representing the United Kingdom to win at X Games: Jenny Jones, who has mentored Brookes since childhood, won consecutive Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle titles in 2009-10. |
| Also a strong street skater, and it shows on the rails of a slopestyle course, where she’s known for both her style and her incredibly technical tricks, like 450 on/450 off combos that are otherwise unheard of in women’s competition. |
| Instagram: @mia_brookes |
