When Toronto snowboarder Ben Heldman found out he’d qualified for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, he had just finished a run in Val St. Combe, Que. during the FIS Snowboard World Cup in 2025. He recalls coming across the line, seeing he’d won his heat and finals and rushing over to his whole family waiting in the finish area.
“I went straight up to them and was hugging them over the fence,” he says. “It was such a surreal moment, and it felt like so much weight was lifted off my shoulders. I was able to go into the summer with a bit more of a relaxed focus.”
The athlete may be heading to Italy for snowboarding (he’ll be representing Team Canada in the parallel giant slalom category), but his Olympic journey started on skis. The 24-year-old recalls starting out in the sport at age four, and begging his parents every year to switch to snowboarding.
“I was a terrible skier,” he shares. “And so my parents got me private snowboarding lessons for my seventh birthday.” His first time on a snowboard was that day, and he never looked back, joining Mansfield Ski Club’s snowboarding program for alpine racing as soon as he could.
“I was the youngest by maybe three or four years,” he laughs. “It was so fun, because it felt like we were all friends and got along, and they all liked me because I was just this little kid following them around.”
He eventually moved to Alpine Ski Club for further snowboarding training in a more competitive program and made it onto the development team.
Heldman says it “clicked” for him that snowboarding was something he wanted to pursue professionally when he won both his events at the FIS Snowboarding Junior World Championships. “I realized this was what I wanted to do and that I could be pretty serious with it, if I’m able to beat and compete with these European kids.”
Name: Ben Heldman
Hometown: Toronto
Sport: Snowboarding
First Olympic event: Feb. 8, parallel giant slalom qualifying round
Favourite place in the city: Evergreen Brick Works
Favourite Toronto memory: Biking with family through Mount Pleasant Cemetery
Born and raised in the city’s Moore Park neighbourhood, Heldman is a Torontonian through and through — he mentions a recent memory of walking his dog through the 7-kilometre loop in Rosedale that passes by Evergreen Brick Works, and running into Blue Jays pitcher Kevin Gausman (“It was the day after they won the ALCS!”). But pursuing a sport like snowboarding means he has to leave the city for almost half the year.
“To be competitive on the world stage, you need to basically live out of Europe for six months, because it’s just where the sport is based out of and where most of the competition is,” he says.
It’s serendipitous, then, that for his very first Olympics, Heldman will be competing in Italy. “My coach is Italian, and he lives 30 minutes from Cortina, and I train with him there the full winter,” he says.
Cortina also happens to be his favourite place in the world to snowboard: “It’s the most beautiful place, so unreal.”
But Heldman says that his sport won’t be competing in Cortina during the Olympics, but rather four hours away in Livigno, an Italian town he’s also familiar with. “Livigno is also so beautiful; it’s the same idea as Cortina in that it’s a bit of bowl, with really tall mountains like a wall around the town.”
The one drawback of competing in a town like Livigno is the accommodations; Heldman says the town is so small that there’s only three ways to get in, one of which is closed during the winter. And entries are regulated so that only those with a hotel reservation can get in — his parents had to book their hotel in October 2024, before Heldman had even qualified.
“By the time I officially qualified, it was already a little bit too late for some of my friends to book,” he says.
Still, when he hits the slopes, his family and his girlfriend will be there to cheer him on, as will plenty of friends and family back in Toronto.
Heldman says he’s got one goal heading into the Olympics: to ride the best he can.
“I just want to be competitive with everybody on the on the world stage, and I think that level of riding I have is definitely good enough to get me on the podium,” he says. “So I’m just hoping to show my best and have fun.”
We’ll be profiling more athletes during the 2026 Winter Olympics; refer here for future coverage.
