By Glenn Cullen

Alex “Chumpy” pullinmightn’t enjoy the celebrity of some of the other darlings of aussie snow sports, but he’s certainly the toast of the Victorian town of mansfield.

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A s far as feeder towns for ski resorts go, Mansfield, at the foothills of Mt Buller, isn’t exactly Innsbruck. Without a

bungy cord or jetboat in sight, the Victorian hamlet with a population struggling to tip 4000 doesn’t hold a struck match to Queenstown in the adrenalin stakes. And, sans a nearby airport, it even lacks the cachet of one of its main competitors for winter traffic, Mount Hotham. But this is a mountain town with spunk, a trait that a certain Ned Kelly exhibited as a timber-getter here 130-odd years ago.

Civic pride in Mansfield means a bit more than the love of one’s Honda. The streets are clean, you’ll struggle to find a lick of graffiti and when the Jeff Kennett Liberal government amalgamated Mansfield with Benalla to form the Delatite Shire in 1994, locals f lipped them a bird the whole Kelly gang would’ve been proud of. Aggrieved at having their community lumped in with another, residents fought the government and eventually won; eight years later Mansfield ceded. It became the first de-amalgamated shire in Victoria’s history.

On its own, Mansfield also has a history of looking after its own. This is no more evident than how it treats its sporting champions. Locals say you don’t need a calendar to know when the Tour de France is on here, you only need notice the many eyes made bleary from a night of keeping tabs on Mansfield’s 2008 stage winner, Simon Gerrans.

There’s equal pride when they talk about Olympic steeplechaser Victoria Mitchell or Gold Coast Suns footballer Josh Fraser. But if you’re looking for the athlete Mansfield created, it’s hard to go past 2011 snowboard cross world champion and overall World Cup winner Alex “Chumpy” Pullin.

Thoughtful, meticulous, humble but with a fire inside, he dismantles many of the snowboarding stereotypes. In turn, Pullin has been forced to exhibit the prime characteristic of a town he says should share his success: grit. He had to call on all his reserves of that Mansfield grit on February 15, 2010, at Cypress Mountain, Vancouver – home of the 21st Winter Olympics. “That was his day to perform,” says Pullin’s coach, Ben Wordsworth.

In a team that had gold medal prospects such as Torah Bright, Dale Begg-Smith, Lydia Lassila and Jacqui Cooper, the name of Pullin was lost in the mix. And not without some reason. There’d been no podium finishes in the lead-up, no ostensible results to suggest something great could happen. But Pullin and those close to him knew his riding had been superb.

On another this-doesn’t-seem-to-be-cold-enough-for-winter day, he suddenly had the Nine Network and a handful of Australian journalists reaching for their phones to explain to their editors who this Chumpy character was and why he might just be the country’s next Olympic gold medallist. The 22-year-old had just qualified top for the finals of his event. First down the course in the race against the clock, Pullin had an inkling it was a good run despite the lack of barometers. “I thought definitely top ten, maybe top five,” he recalls. “All of a sudden I didn’t get knocked off and was still sitting in first.” This was no fluke. Toying with the

idea of skipping his second qualifying run, Pullin then made a split-second decision to go again after American Graham Watanabe edged his time. “It was like,

‘Bugger that. I’m going to knock it off!’” That he did, restoring the top qualifying position, choice of gate for the first run and – in theory – a path to the final that would see him avoid his main opposition. But qualifying and head-to-head competition in this rough and tumble sport would be akin to comparing Perisher’s Front Valley to the fabled downhill of Hahnenkamm. With three other riders on a narrow course, qualification only gets you a ticket to the ball – not necessarily the pick of the ladies as well.

Leading from the front in what was very much his tactic du jour, Pullin looked the goods until about two thirds of the way through. “In just one moment, I caught the snow ... when the board went off, a brief moment of doubt went through my mind. Instead of attacking, I just wanted to play it safe before the jump.” Pullin fell - Olympic Games 2010 over and out. “Even though that was a

shitty experience, it probably did him the world of good as an athlete,” says Wordsworth. That it did. Within 13 months Pullin would be regarded as the premier exponent of his sport in the world.

For Olympic purists and many outsiders,

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snowboard cross may seem like a throwaway sport; spak-filler and Red Bull for those with short attention spans. But for those with even a minor fascination for the white room, it’s hard not be impressed. Even the blazer-wearers from the IOC couldn’t help but smile when it debuted at Torino at the ’06 Games in front of heaving crowds at Bardonecchia. Sure, it was an easy grab at the youth market, but it also has the visceral and technical elements that make it one of the most engaging 90-second sporting packages you’re likely to see.

There’s speed, banked turns, jumps, tactics, argy-bargy, the constant threat of an icy spill and the absence of judged elements – the bugbear of many other winter sports. And while it gets the moniker of motocross on snow, Pullin has started thinking it actually plays out a lot more like MotoGP. “I saw Stoner pull a move on Lorenzo ... He had some speed in the turns for about three laps, but he was patient and the way he played it, you could see he was just waiting for that one little opportunity.

The thing that really ticked with me was, in boarder cross, we don’t have that kind of time. A minute or a minute-and-a-half and you think, ‘I’ve got to get this done,’ and rush the move and try to force it.”

This was Pullin’s Eureka moment. It suddenly dawned on him that leading from the front wasn’t the only way to skin a snowboarder. “Drafting ... riding into the turn and taking a higher line – a longer radius turn, but in the end you go straighter rather than over-steer, which in MotoGP is much the same. Run the turn out wide using the draft, make a clean pass into the next straight when there’s plenty of room and don’t come anywhere near the other rider. The other thing about that is he doesn’t expect you’re coming.”

Truth was, no one outside the Pullin camp really

saw him coming. He wouldn’t beat

himself up about the Olympic experience. His preparations

were good. He was faster than ever. He figured he only needed

to tweak a few

things in his repertoire. “There was so much of the Olympic plan I wouldn’t change – the hard part was there was one tiny moment I would.” Less than a month after the Games, Pullin won his first World Cup event in Valmalenco, Italy and a week later he was second to soon-to-be fierce rival Pierre Vaultier of France. It ensured he would finish the season second overall. The following World Cup campaign began with two podiums in three starts before what would turn out to be a stunning World Championships for Australia in Spain. In boardshort weather, the Aussie interlopers would claim the men’s (Nate Johnstone) and women’s (Holly Crawford) halfpipe titles to punctuate just how far a team without a Winter Olympics gold medal less than a decade before had come.

Still, it was Pullin who stood tallest. With pro halfpipe riders generally skipping World Cup/World Championships, their competition was always going to be a case of the best of the rest. There’s no such division in snowboard cross, however, and a world championship really does mean you’re the best in the world. }

No oNe outside the PulliN camP saw him comiNg.

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In sunny La Molina, things went smoothly for Pullin, from qualifying right through to the semi-finals. Then trouble struck. Thinking the starter had been getting in a rhythm, Pullin barged the gate, completely missing the drop. “Earlier in my career I would’ve panicked,” he says. Not today. Trailing two-time Olympic gold medallist Seth Wescott, Pullin kept his head, even speed-checking before he busted a passing move on a bank-turn that would take him through to the final as the second qualifier from the four-man group.

There’d be no such mistakes in the decider, Pullin showing his versatility to lead from the front after the first jump, staying on the high side throughout the race to hold off a fast-finishing Wescott to become Australia’s first snowboard world champion.

And that could have quite happily been that, except Pullin had an overall title to chase, too. Fourth going into the final two events, back-to-back rounds in Switzerland, the odds were against him, but the thinking person’s snowboarder hatched a plan based on getting into both finals and hoping for a bit of luck.

After finishing fourth on day one, Pullin moved into third overall, but he’d need Vaultier not to make the final of the second event to be any chance of capturing the title. As it turned out, the goofy-footer Vaultier and natural-standing Pullin would quite literally face each other in the semi-final. They made some small talk at the gate, but the young Victorian reckons he had him at hello. “At

the second berm [banked wall], anyone who went down the inside on heel edge would crash – it had happened in first semi ... we were going into that berm side-by-side, face-to-face. It was just a moment – I was 100 per cent confident in that move. I was going to break him right here. I dove in on the heelside and everything went as smooth as it could. Pierre came in on the high side ... he reached out with his upper body a bit and just fell ... ” The final was a no-contest, with Pullin winning in a canter to add a world cup crown to his world championship.

The things that went on between his ears got Pullin over the line, but it was a background out of the box that got him to the starting gate. With his old man owning the local ski shop at Mansfield, Pullin Jr was at a distinct advantage, hitting the slopes at Mt Buller whenever he could. As a grommet he got one of the smallest boards available in the country at the time and began competing in everything from halfpipe to parallel giant slalom and the nascent discipline of snowboard cross, where he’d go on to become national champion at just 15.

Former high school teacher turned Mansfield gym owner Steve Ward recalls his “whatever it takes” attitude. “He’d be at the gym at lunchtime or we’d use kids playground equipment to mimic starts. With his training, never once would he ask, ‘What the fuck are we doing this for?’”

Funded only by his folks and the Mansfield community, Pullin finished third at the 2007 World Junior Championships, something

Geoff Lipshut, the man behind Australia’s uber-successful Olympic Winter Institute, says just doesn’t happen. A scholarship program at the OWI was unsurprisingly created for him shortly thereafter. “He’s a real athlete,” says Lipshut. “The guy wants to win and will do anything in terms of preparation and training to give himself a chance – which is a mark of a champion.”

And then there was the unofficial education – his parents focusing less on formal learning and more on life skills and lifestyle, with Alex and his sister Emma spending chunks of the year sailing around the world. “There was a lot of trust there,” says Pullin. “At three or four I would be taking a dinghy into the beach by myself. There was never that protection. We learned to be independent. We got taught the right way to do things. So when I started going overseas [by himself to snowboard from the age of 15] it wasn’t a big deal. I knew it was a gift, a real opportunity, so I wasn’t going to waste my time over there.”

Nor did he want to waste what Mansfield had done for him. Any time he achieved something it was as much for the local builders, massage therapist or conga line of locals who’d throw some money his way at his regular fundraisers as it was for him.

As world champion he was recently handed the keys to the town, but given he still calls the place home and doors in Mansfield are always open for him in any case, he probably won’t be needing them any time soon. n

Pullin didn’t want to waste whatMansfield had done for hiM.

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If “Chumpy” Pullin was handed a “Mansfield” flag after his World Champs triumph, he would have flown that, too.

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