Kimmy Fasani On Why Natural Selection Tour Is Her Perfect Return To Competitive Snowboarding

If you had asked professional snowboarder Kimmy Fasani one year ago what she would be doing now, taking part in her first snowboarding competition in years—the Natural Selection Tour—wouldn’t have even made the list.

This time last year, Fasani was just three months removed from a diagnosis of aggressive stage 3 inflammatory breast cancer, for which she would receive 10 months of treatment—six rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and 30 rounds of radiation. The treatments made her sick, and Fasani wasn’t able to snowboard—something she’s been doing since she was nine and competitively since she was 15.

The diagnosis was one of several personal and family challenges Fasani has faced in recent years, all of which forced her to continually reevaluate her identity—professional snowboarder, advocate, real estate agent, author, mother, wife.

She was working hard to prove that she could balance a snowboarding career with raising her two boys—Koa, who is almost five, and Zeppelin, who is two—alongside her husband, professional skier Chris Benchetler.

And what a career it’s been so far.

Fasani is one of the most integral snowboarders not only in progressing the women’s side of the sport but in big-mountain riding overall. In 2011, she became the first woman to land a double backflip in the terrain park. In 2017, she won rider and video part of the year.

Early on in her career, Fasani was one of few female snowboarders getting segments in the male-dominated world of filming. And she was actively laying tracks for other women in the industry to follow, creating women’s terrain park progression event Amusement Park in 2013, which evolved into backcountry-focused event Amusement MTN, and working with &Mother to removing systemic barriers for women in sports who choose to become mothers.

When Fasani became pregnant in 2017, she worked with her sponsor, Burton, on a contract that provided pregnancy and postpartum support, and not long after the company announced that going forward, all female athlete contracts worldwide would include language supporting and protecting women during and after pregnancy, with specific provisions included.

“Burton, and all of my sponsors, have stood behind me through some of the most challenging situations of my life,” Fasani told me. “As athletes, sometimes the financial side can be blinding, but in the big scheme of things, if we align ourselves with brands who care for us, who can treat us like family, who want to support us as mothers, athletes, parents—if they can support us through life’s challenges, ultimately we’re all going to rise together.”

With all these bigger-picture focuses, it’s not a surprise that competitive snowboarding and filming took a bit of a back seat for Fasani.

“I feel like so much of my career in the last five years has really been advocacy and showing I can maintain motherhood and my career, which has been extremely challenging,” Fasani said. “I faced a lot of personal life difficulties and as soon as I was diagnosed I almost just felt like, ‘OK, maybe I’m not supposed to snowboard anymore.’”

Fasani says never really expected to go through cancer, even though she lost each of her parents to it. It was “a really big perspective shift of what was important,” she said. “If you had asked me last year what I would be doing this year, I would have had very low expectations,” she added. She had made the decision to focus all her energy on surviving cancer.

But she missed the outlet snowboarding had always provided, and she struggled with the lack of physical exercise and the natural endorphins it can bring. She felt depleted and mentally exhausted.

Sensing this, her husband and Burton worked together to plan a family trip to Baldface Lodge in British Columbia, and Fasani was shocked at what happened when got back on her board.

“As soon as I strapped into my board, I felt I had an alter ego step forward,” she said. “I felt like it healed my inner spirit. I felt this electric energy where I was unstoppable, I felt I could do anything.”

That realization and reconnection with a core part of her identity changed Fasani’s perspective. When she finished all her cancer treatments in August, the thing she longed for most was to be in nature.

“I needed to rebuild a relationship with the positive side of my mind, needed to work on my mental health,” she said. “The more time I spent in nature, the more I felt like myself and felt grounded.”

With the snowboarding season approaching, Fasani certainly didn’t think about returning to competition. “I more so looked at it as how can I have the most fun possible, how can I enjoy being back with my community, which has supported me and I felt so well connected to,” she said. “And that’s when Travis reached out about Natural Selection.”

Facing the question of whether to accept the invitation to join the Natural Selection Tour this season was “terrifying,” Fasani said. But Rice and the Natural Selection committee stressed that Fasani could participate in the event in any way she felt comfortable, and with a new first-stage format this year—more on that soon—Fasani would be able to host the first stage of the competition at her home mountain in Mammoth Lakes.

“I just couldn’t say no; these are my people, and this is so what my heart is calling for,” Fasani said. “I love riding big mountains and I felt like this would be a really great way to step back into that courage of doing hard things, but hard things that are really fun. After cancer and the life challenges I’ve been through, snowboarding is relatively easy. I get to spend so much quality time with people I love, explore new places and have new experiences. That’s why I said yes.”

Through the development of what he calls the “modern iteration” of Natural Selection Tour, three seasons in, Rice says Fasani has always been one of the women at the “top of the list” of potential invitees. “She’s such a beloved figure in our community,” he told me.

In December, Rice had the chance to ride with Fasani, which confirmed for him—for both of them, really—that she was going to do this.

“Hearing from her just how ready she was and her wanting to come back, and that she wasn’t finished—she still had things she wanted to accomplish in snowboarding—for us it was a no-brainer,” Rice said. “And so her being able to accept an invitation and enter into the season—I love this storyline, because I think that she’s a true wild card. She has a leg up on a lot of the women on the tour just because she has pushed women’s riding in big mountain terrain. That is where she thrives.”

For its third season, the Natural Selection Tour changed up its format slightly. For the first stage of competition, it introduced a “DUELS” format, which are one-day competitions (12 in all) between a “defending” rider—most qualifying with their 2022 Tour results, and some selected due to their backcountry seniority—and a “challenging” rider.

Fasani was slotted in as a defending rider, which meant she got to select the terrain on which she and her competitor—Darrah Reid-McLean—would compete, filming their best lines to then be released as their “DUEL.” Their video dropped Tuesday on Red Bull TV.

And yet, there is a collaborative element to the format. Fasani and Reid-McLean were also working together to scope a backcountry zone and to ensure each other’s safety and success, one of many elements that sets Natural Selection apart from other competitions.

“Mammoth was so open-armed and willing to support this event, and the weather and snow conditions were the most perfect it could have been,” Fasani said, noting that there had been stacked storms the days before holding the DUEL, with blue skies and sun on January 6, go day.

“Being able to stand up at the top of that face with Darrah and also help share my knowledge with her was a really special experience,” Fasani said. “In saying yes to Natural Selection, I still didn’t how know I was going to perform. My biggest goal of that day was to have the most fun I could, surrounded by amazing people, great vibes, amazing weather.”

Fasani praised the new DUELS format for allowing riders to hone their creativity and ride the terrain they want to ride—and for her, personally, it truly made her feel like committing to the Tour was something she could handle.

“Every time I dropped in I just felt so inspired that we were out there doing this together. Ultimately, walking away with the win for the DUEL, I just felt so grateful,” Fasani said. “To see my body had the stamina and resilience, I felt so fulfilled. That is the ultimate achievement.”

Now that she’s gotten through the DUELS stage, Fasani and the rest of the DUELS winners—eight men and four women in all—will head to Revelstoke in British Columbia for the second stage of this year’s competition, with a weather window of March 4-11.

While DUELS are scored on raw footage of the entire session for overall performance that day, the other two stages are scored head-to-head, taking into account the best-scoring single run. The five-person judging panel—Connor Manning, Jody Wachniak, Giom Morriest, Bryan Fox and Chad Otterstrom—uses a rubric called CREDO to evaluate riders, taking into account creativity, risk, execution, style, difficulty and overall run.

While the DUELS will air on Red Bull TV, the final two stages of the Tour will live on Natural Selection’s website.

We don’t know what the final 12-rider field in B.C. will be yet, but Fasani is excited about any possible permutation the field could take. It will be her first time riding in the backcountry with a crew outside of her Burton family.

“Riding big mountains with a variety of talents and different styles is so beneficial because it just shines such a powerful spotlight on what’s possible,” she said.

Fasani is thrilled to see what the young guns in women’s snowboarding are doing in the backcountry, highlighted by Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (whose DUEL against Marissa Krawczak has not yet aired), who came to the Tour from competitive slopestyle and proved herself to be at home immediately.

Fasani also had words of praise for Elena Hight, who took home the NST overall women’s title in 2022, as well as heavy-hitters Anna Gasser and Mary Rand as women she loves to watch ride big-mountain terrain generally. (Neither is competing on the Tour this season.)

“Watching Elena have such an incredible season last year and ride so confidently, all of this is just helping our generation of women and the next generation realize what is possible,” Fasani said. “When you see something, you can do it.”

While she’s thrilled with the unexpected turn her season has taken, returning to competitive snowboarding, Fasani is getting a lot of fulfillment from her other projects.

She and Benchetler recently founded the Benchetler Fasani Foundation, a non-profit that works to help connect people going through hardship to nature, inspired in part by the transformative trip to Baldface she had while she was undergoing cancer treatment.

And Fasani just recently signed on to work with A New Earth Project, a Tour partner, to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of packaging materials that get into the planet’s waterways.

The message Fasani would like anyone who is following her journey returning to snowboarding after cancer to take away is that everyone’s journey is different and it’s important to remember which stage of your own you’re in.

When she watched Max Parrot, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in December 2018, return to the Olympics at the Beijing 2022 Games and win gold, Fasani felt like she’d never be able to do that, she said. But she just wasn’t at the right point in her journey to envision it.

“Because I have been snowboarding for most of my life, it’s somewhat like going for a walk in a weird way. When people see what I’ve experienced, I want them to know they can do whatever they put their minds to,” Fasani said.

“For me, coming back to snowboarding was really where my heart was and I felt strong enough to do it. I feel like believing in ourselves and working on our mental health is how we can accomplish that next step in our own evolution.”