LIVIGNO, Italy — When Team USA snowboarder Jess Perlmutter gets finished chasing medals in Italy, she’ll have homework to do.
A lot of homework.
“I had like 42 assignments missing, like last week,” Perlmutter said with a laugh. “Which is really bad. I’m usually a good student and only have like a few missing.”
Perlmutter and teammate Lily Dhawornvej will compete Feb. 17 in a final at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Each qualified Feb. 15 by finishing the top 12 of the women’s slopestyle qualifying at Livigno Sports Park, which was a heck of an achievement considering this fact:
Both are only 16 years old.
In snowboarding and freestyle skiing, that’s not too young to represent the United States in an Olympics. And particularly these Olympics. Some of brightest rising stars in Livigno have been high school aged kids. On the men’s side, 17-year-old Americans Ollie Martin (big air/slopestyle) and Alessandro Barbieri (halfpipe) have each impressed.
“We’re young,” Perlmutter said, “but it’s a pretty young sport.”
Indeed. Ten of the 30 riders in the women’s slopestyle qualifying, including Perlmutter and Dhawornvej, weren’t born before 2007. Sky Remans, who competed for Belgium, won’t turn 16 until October.
Obvious question: What are these kids doing for high school?
Answer: The majority are taking online classes that offer the flexibility to complete course work on their own timeframes while competing globally.
“My schedule just got pretty busy,” said Dhawornvej, of Colorado. “I wasn’t really home that much. Online is definitely the move. … It’s pretty hard. I’m not going to lie. I’m pretty behind on a lot of my schoolwork. But I do online school, so I can snowboard and just do it online whenever I have time.”
Freestyle skier Avery Krumme, 17, reached the finals of the slopestyle at this Olympics, finishing 11th. She is a native Canadian who chose to compete for the United States, and she does “online school through my local high school,” she said.
“My teachers are really kind,” Krumme said. “They sort of let me go slow, because they understand this takes up a lot of my time and effort, and just everything goes into my skiing and training for it. So they understand. I’ll hopefully graduate this June. We’re working up to that.”
Perlmutter, who’s originally from New Jersey, attends the Killington Mountain School in Vermont, a school geared toward helping winter sports athletes “pursue excellence on the slopes and in the classroom,” reads the school’s website.
“It’s not fully online,” Perlmutter said. “I can go in there whenever I want and do school, just like a normal school. But, yeah, I just do it from remote. … Especially at this level, pretty much everyone, if they are doing school, they are doing online or a special program or something.”
And about those missing assignments?
“Honestly,” Perlmutter said, “I’ll just tell my teachers that I’m at the Olympics.”
