Yiwei Zhang is at the forefront of the China’s surge into snowboarding. He’s spent the last few years climbing the World Snowboard Tour’s rankings, making it to 12th in the 13/14 season. In 2013 he came second at the Arctic Challenge, and he cracked the top 10 in the 2014 X Games before finishing an impressive 6th at Sochi 2014. In 2015 he picked up another silver at the FIS World Championships, behind Scotty James.
Without any major wins to his name, he remained in the peripherals of halfpipe competition behind the big names like Iouri Podlatchikov and Danny Davis. However, when he unleased the world’s first halfpipe triple in April 2015 (beating contenders Shaun White and Ayumu Hirano to the punch) a lot more people sat up and took notice of this young Chinese rider.