Wherever your friends are: The Peter Olenick Profile
By: Matt Harvey
In 2004, an unknown, blue-haired, straight-edge, 19-year-old named Peter Olenick left the comfortable confines of his Carbondale, Colorado, crib for the X Qualifiers in Breckenridge. A week later, he returned to Aspen to take two podium finishes at the most coveted contest of them all: the X Games.
Three years later, sitting down with Peter in the house he rents with his brother and two college friends in Boulder, life has changed drastically for the oldest Olenick child. Peering into the house from outside, all one sees is a beautiful 53-inch plasma TV hanging on the wall: the stamp of a well-furnished and polished home. On the inside, his house is littered with beer cans, a beer pong table sits permanently in the living room, broken chairs hang together by a thread, mud stains the hardwood floor and no less than five people who don’t live in the house lurk in the living room at all hours.
The contrast of this place mirrors the last three years of Peter’s life. A super pro on the outside — traveling on other people’s dime all over the world, living the ultimate fantasy — but a 23-year-old college kid on the inside who cares about nothing more than having a great time with his friends. Peter lives his life with the feeling that the best place in the world is wherever your friends are. For this three-time X Games medalist, two-time Ski Tour podium finisher, and Poor Boyz, Warren Miller and TGR athlete, his friends are wherever he is.
I was going to call this profile “Entourage,” because you never travel alone. What’s the deal with the crew?
I don’t know… even when I try to go to small dinners, by the time we get there we’re with nine or 15 people. I usually just have my brother, my sister and then my friends Caitlin and Andrew. We just kind of go as a group everywhere together.
Has it always been like that for you?
I’d say with my brother and sister, the three of us always do everything together. We weren’t so cool in high school, so it was just the three of us. And now that we have a lot more friends, we all just stick as a pack and go everywhere together.
I’ve been to your house each of the last couple years for Thanksgiving. There’s a real sense of inclusion with your family. Is that the way you were brought up?
Yeah, well, when we were brought up my parents were divorced so we would spend one year with my dad and the next year with my mom. Then as we got older and started skiing and moved to Boulder, a lot of our friends didn’t have places to go for Thanksgiving. My mom likes being the soccer mom and just started inviting everyone. I think the first year we had, maybe, 15 people plus our whole family so like, 35 people. I remember you were there spilling beer all over my grandfather. We do a big grace where everybody holds hands and you just say, “I love you,” to the person next to you. It gets really awkward when you don’t know the person’s name. But yeah, it’s one big family.
;b>Back when you were in a racing program at the ski club, were you and your brother noticeably better than other kids? Did you think maybe you could make a career of it?
I never thought I would be able to make a career out of it because, at that time, there were moguls, racing and sort of extreme skiing. We just liked skiing around and jumping off everything. I would say we were noticeably better than most of the other kids. There was another group of kids that Steele Spence was in that we called the Bumpers and they would go down groomers, like, knees together pole planting – it was so ridiculous. So Steele and I were rivals forever ‘cause he was the best in his group and I was in mine. Then we went on this trip with Josh Berman (of Level 1 Productions) and we were like, “Hey.” “Hey.” “Cool.” We’ve been friends ever since.
Your first real filming trip was with Berman back in 2002. How did that come about?
I went to Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) and all the seniors got to do a senior project. You could do anything you wanted; you didn’t have to write a paper or anything, you could just go off and get real-world experience for a month. So of course I go off skiing with Berman on a film trip. I kinda did well at the US Open, and he knew I was good at rails, so he wanted me to come. I go to the East Coast, land in New York, get picked up by Scott Hibbert in his little Acura 1.6EL that sounded like it was from Fast and the Furious, and I’m just like, who is this Canadian? I get in the car, drive straight to Ottawa and the border guy stops us because he’s never seen a Colorado ID and thought it was fake. So they search Hibbert’s whole car, they search me — it takes like, two hours. Hibbert doesn’t even know me and he’s like, “Who’s this young American screwing with our system?” Then we met up with Dave Crichton and did a contest in… what’s that town with the great crêpes?
Mont Tremblant.
Yeah, Tremblant. We did the Tremblant big air, the Côté D’Obscure. I don’t even know what trick I did. Probably a cork 7 or a cork 9.
With just your tips crossed?
Yeah. Just my tips crossed, super bad. Didn’t do very well. I didn’t party at this time in my life and everyone went out there so hard. Philou worked at one of the bars. I was in there drinking energy drinks getting wired. Everyone was hammered. Crichton climbs like four stories up into our hotel room, jumps in and just scares the shit out of Berman. Finn — yeah, I was with Derek Finn on the trip — he was drinking a pony keg. I was just blown away. I was like, “Holy cow, man. What
is this?”
After that trip, Berman told Freeskier: “[Peter is] ultra straight-edge. We were in Tremblant on his 18th birthday where drinking’s legal at that age. We tried to get him drunk, but he just had chocolate chip cookies and milk to celebrate. That’s him in a nutshell, for sure.” What happened?
What happened to me was I drove from Colorado all the way to Whistler but didn’t quite make it because the border guards turned us around. My friend Andrew and I were super pissed and spent our first night maybe 30 feet from the border in a hotel – we could see the other side – and Andrew was like, “Do you want to get drunk?” I think I was 20.
Why didn’t they let you into Canada?
Everybody’s always like, “You got kicked out because you were trying to sell a bunch of stuff there.” But what happened was they saw my truck full of gear. Obermeyer had sent us up there with maybe 100 t-shirts to give out to campers. We had 30 hats that we had crocheted on our road trip. So they pulled us over and searched our truck. We didn’t have drugs, so we were just dicking around having fun, and so they started to really not like us. They’re hassling us the whole time about the stuff in the truck. Then they searched my name on Google, found me on the High North website and it said I was a coach. I told them that I get to ski for free and they give me food and a place to stay and I coach kids so I can ski. They said that’s still work, a Canadian could do that, and banned me for a year.
