Heading into the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, American snowboarder was becoming a genuine challenge to the dominance of the superstar nicknamed “The Flying Tomato” for his long red hair, who took gold four years prior at the . Pearce, a Vermont native, had defeated White at l. He’s been called White’s They were caught in an aerial competition, each trying to outdo the other with more complex tricks.
Then, at a December 2009 halfpipe event in Copper Mountain, Colorado, Pearce fell during a qualifying run. “I was totally out of it,” Pearce says. “I felt so dizzy and disoriented.” A coach noticed something was wrong and told him to sit out the next run. Pearce refused. “No one could tell me what to do,” Pearce says. He didn’t crash again but ended up in 18th place.
Less than two weeks after that, on New Year’s Eve 2009, Pearce was practicing a double cork—two flips with several spins—on a pipe in Park City, Utah. It was a trick he’d need for the Olympics. He landed, but sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left him unconscious and in critical condition, required , and still impacts his neurological function today. He was fortunate to survive. The injury effectively ended his top-level competitive snowboarding career. Pearce would never make it to the Olympics.
Over 15 years later, Pearce—talking from his home in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where he lives with his wife and three kids, all 5 or younger—can’t remember what happened that day. Pearce has no recollection of the accident or the terrifying month that came after. In early February 2010, as the Vancouver Games were set to start, Pearce from a Utah hospital to a Denver facility that specializes in TBI rehabilitation. A few months later, he went back to Vermont to recover.
Pearce thinks he pushed himself too far. Returning so quickly from his Colorado fall made his Park City injury worse. he stresses, is very real. “By far the most crucial lesson anyone can take from my accident is that if you hit your head, you have to rest,” Pearce says.
The crash created one of the biggest “what ifs” in U.S. Olympic history. Even though White was great— winning a third Olympic title in PyeongChang in 2018—Pearce, who was just 22 when injured, was pushing him. It’s possible Pearce would have become one of America’s top 21st-century Winter Olympians, alongside the likes of , and
But Pearce’s experience—which was documented in the 2013 documentary The Crash Reel—has led to positive outcomes. With his brother, , Pearce founded the Love Your Brain Foundation, a nonprofit that, per its , has directly helped over 57,000 people in 30 countries through initiatives like retreats for brain injury survivors and caregivers, hospital partnerships to provide evidence-based programs for those with brain injuries, and meditation resources for TBI patients. Pearce has also spoken at events; he met his wife, Kaitlyn Pearce, in 2018 after she invited him to address employees at her former workplace, Twitter. Pearce is working to get a scripted film about his life made. When he’s not taking care of his young family in Florida’s sunshine, you’ll often find him surfing in the Atlantic.
His story is anything but tragic. “I truly feel like I’ve been able to help many people who’ve dealt with brain injuries,” Pearce says. “When I was snowboarding, I wasn’t helping anyone. I was only helping myself.”
But daily struggles remain. Pearce sometimes forgets grocery lists and simple instructions, and he links his lack of a filter to the accident. Once, Pearce was dining with a friend and his wife, and when the bill came, he accused the woman of leeching off his friend. “That ended a friendship,” Kaitlyn says. On another occasion, Kaitlyn snuck an extra half-hour of sleep in the morning after being up all night with their baby. Pearce called her lazy.
“Oh, she lost it,” says Pearce.
“A lot of that is tough for me to get over,” Kaitlyn says. “It just makes a difficult day even harder.”
They’re pushing through. Pearce will watch the Milano Cortina Olympics: even though he never got his chance on the biggest stage, he says it doesn’t hurt to watch. “It’s fun for me to watch those guys because I know what it’s like to win,” Pearce says. “Not at the Olympics, of course, but at some of the biggest snowboarding events. That feeling is the best in the world.”
Yet, he can’t help but wish he’d had his own Olympic moment. “God, that’s the hardest part,” Pearce says. “I know it would have been amazing. A lot of snowboarders tried to act cool. They’d say, ‘I don’t like the Olympics. I don’t want to do that.’ But I was like, ‘No, I’m going to go, and I’m going to win.’ That’s all I ever wanted.”