After the most hectic year of her young career — one with unending testing, a broken wrist that followed a broken humerus, and the general chaos of navigating life as an Olympic hopeful while uncertainty looms above like a storm on the mountain — the manner in which Brooke D’Hondt found out her dreams came true was surprisingly low-key. “I kind of just got an email about it,” she says with a laugh. Mellow as the delivery method might’ve been, the news relayed to her inbox in that particular message was life-altering — it informed D’Hondt she had qualified for the 2022 Winter Olympics, granting her a path to the biggest stage of her career thus far. In getting there, D’Hondt earned the unique distinction of being Canada’s youngest Olympian at the 2022 Games, the Calgarian snowboarder set to take on the half-pipe in Beijing at just 16 years old. But while the opportunity to compete against the world’s best comes early in D’Hondt’s career, the pandemic’s made her earn it all t...