Apprentice bricklayer from Barnsley swaps building site for Youth Olympics

And not only that, get so good at it that by the age of 18 he is representing Great Britain at the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival.

Just ask Koby Cook, the young man in question, who shunned the traditional sports his schoolmates were getting into to pursue an adrenalin surge on snow-capped mountains.

“My mum and dad were skiers, my dad used to go to Sheffield ski village, everyone in the family started doing it and I started skiing at about three,” begins Cook, who for all his home town of Barnsley might not appear a traditional winter sports hotbed, it is at least sandwiched between two venues equipped to satisfy his interest in the sport.

“By the time I was five I was snowboarding and I started that up at Xscape is Castleford.”

He can still be found up at the SnoZone at Xscape most Fridays throughout the summer, but even then that is about as much training as he can fit in.

During the winter he heads to the Alps, either Austria or Switzerland, to put in a sustained block of training.

His parents support him financially, that and funding from Sports Aid, but Cook is also studying a vocational subject at college that will provide him with a safety net and also a bit of money to fund his ambition of becoming a full-time athlete.

“I’m doing a bricklaying apprenticeship with my dad and also going to college to learn how to be a bricklayer,” says Cook.

“Because it’s my Dad, he lets me have time off through the winter to go snowboarding. I’m really lucky with that.”

Snowboarding was a hobby until he hit his teenage years, when his daring and risk-taking at Xscape got him noticed.

“I started doing slopestyle at Castleford and got to a level where I was doing decent tricks at quite a young age,” says Cook.

“I think it was when I was 13, or even a bit younger, I tried out for the GB team and ever since have been going to the mountains and progressing and it’s taken me to where I am today.”

Where he is today is Vuokatti, Finland, for the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival, competing in snowboard Big Air qualifying today and hopefully the final tomorrow, and then slopestyle qualifying on Thursday with the final on Friday.

He has been waiting over a year for this opportunity, with the Covid pandemic forcing the postponement of the festival twice in 2021.

“I haven’t done a competition for two years,” he admits. “The last one I did was in America and I won it. I’ve effectively had two years off. So I’m just going to try my best and see what happens.

“It’s huge for me, a good experience, a chance to see what everyone else is doing and how they approach it.

“Because it’s a Youth Olympics it really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so it will be good to have fun and see what it’s all about. But mainly I just want to enjoy it, enjoy the experience and make some memories.”

Like many of us last month, Cook was glued to the television watching the Beijing Winter Olympics.

“I was following slopestyle and Big Air to see how creative they were, how they approached the competition, the course, how they attacked it,” he says of what he learned.

“Especially in Big Air, everyone does as big a trick as they possibly can and risks it all just to land the big trick.

“What I liked about slopestyle was that you be can creative and do it completely different to everyone else. Whatever feels best to you, you can do it in your own way. So that’s what I’ll do, try and be creative and do a different routine to everyone else and see how that turns out.”

And then it’s back to Barnsley, to laying bricks, emboldened by a renewed determination to reach the snowboard mountain top.