Siddhartha Ullah: GB snowboarder on his Los Angeles upbringing and the Winter Youth Olympics

A seven-year-old Siddhartha Ullah was watching the 2014 Winter Olympics on TV when a realisation hit him.

“This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to become a halfpipe snowboarder,” he thought.

A kid with a dream, but as a kid growing up by the beach in Los Angeles, one that looked even more unlikely to come true. Ten years on, Ullah is about to compete for Team GB at the Winter Youth Olympics in South Korea.

“My mum jokes ‘I wish you would have become a surfer because I could have been in warm weather’,” Ullah, now 17, tells BBC Sport.

It was his mum, who has no background in winter sports, who first took him up the mountains as a two-year-old, invited on a trip by their neighbours.

Three years later he joined a snowboarding team at Mountain High, an hour’s drive from LA, where a coach – excited by a young Ullah’s talents in the pipe – encouraged him to start competing.

But it was after watching the Sochi Olympics that a fun weekend hobby became so much more.

From then on, Ullah and his mum would spend their winters in snowy Colorado, chasing that dream together.

“I watched one of the competitors, Ayumu Hirano, it was his first time competing in it and he got silver,” says Ullah.

“But I remember I was also a tiny kid then, and he was very young. He was 15. I remember watching him being like ‘I want to do what he’s doing’.”

Japan’s Hirano would go on to become halfpipe Olympic champion at Beijing 2022, and while competing against his hero at Milan Cortina 2026 is at the top of Ullah’s bucket list, he will get his first taste of Games life wearing Team GB kit at this month’s Winter Youth Olympics in Gangwon.

Despite his Californian upbringing, Ullah says it was a “no-brainer” for him to represent Great Britain after being raised by his single British-Bangladeshi mum, whose family are in Manchester and Northampton.

He competed in his first World Cup in 2021 and this weekend will ride in Laax, Switzerland, before heading to Gangwon after the start of the Games on Friday.

There, Ullah will be part of a 39-strong Team GB squad of athletes aged between 15 and 18, knowing the “valuable experience” it will bring.

“It’s definitely been a goal and a benchmark for me for a very long time,” he adds. “And it’s definitely a step towards where I want to go in my career, in riding and a step towards the Olympics.

“But I’m just so looking forward to the experience of getting to represent out there and getting to compete on a stage that I feel like is unlike anything I’ve had previously.

“With all the other competitions, they’re more relaxed I feel. But the Youth Olympics and the Olympics, you’re in the village…it’s an entire experience outside of competing.

“I feel as someone who has grown up training in the States representing Great Britain, something that I feel like I’ve been lacking a little bit is I haven’t really got to connect with the team.

“These are probably going be people I’ll see in two years at the 2026 Olympics. It’s going to be super cool, I’m so excited to get to show support to all the sports.”

In competing at the Winter Youth Olympics, Ullah is the first snowboarder of black and south Asian heritage to represent Team GB.

People from BAME backgrounds have long been vastly under-represented in winter sports and Ullah, whose father is African-American, says he “definitely noticed” the lack of diversity on the slopes from a young age.

“I can’t say that it’s not obvious,” adds Ullah. “It definitely is apparent, but I feel like over the years there’s been an increase in diversity that I definitely would like to see increasing as time goes forward.

“It’s definitely a homogeneous sport for the most part, but there have been some legendary riders of colour in history, like [American snowboarder] Keir Dillon.

“I’m super excited to be able to represent both sides of my heritage out there.

“I would love to have other young kids be inspired to get into the sport and actually know that it’s an option of something that they can pursue.

“I would 100% love to see more diversity, and I would love to help in that increase.”

Away from the slopes, Ullah is a freshman at Stanford University, starting a year early after skipping a grade. He finished school as the valedictorian of his class – the highest-performing student.

He hopes to pursue majors in the somewhat polar subjects of neuroscience and architecture, emphasising the importance of having something else to focus on than his sport.

“Especially in an individual sport, you don’t really get to interact with people too often so I think like not even just in terms of academic way, but also in a social way it’s like super nice to get to interact with other people,” he says.

“But also academics has been something that’s been really important to me since I got into this sport.

“My mum was always like, OK, you can snowboard, but as long as you keep your grades up and as long as you stay focused on that. It’s played an important role in my life.”