The It Girl

A knockout combo of skill, swagger and, yeah, sex appeal has turned Tara Dakides into snowboarding’s brightest star

She's such a powerful rider that sometimes people will come up to her and say, 'I didn't even know you were a girl.'" Joey Terrill

I know I don't turn 16 till New Year's Day, but you should give me a chance. The way you ride just turns me on so much.
-- screen name Boardpunk, in a Web chat with Tara Dakides

Even under a brilliant midday moon and at the foot of a powdery paradise, Tara Dakides is not happy. Ostensibly she's training for a competition in Europe, but from the look on her face and the slump in her shoulders -- not to mention the snowy residue of a spill on her backside -- Dakides, perhaps the world's finest female snowboarder, is plainly disgusted with her two newest rides. Her bindings are too wide for proper control and the boards, stiff as a shot of Cuervo, have thwarted her every move down her hometown hill in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. After two disappointing runs Dakides has had enough.

As she stalks through the parking lot, she talks quickly, shedding her misery like too many layers of clothes. "If I can't do any better than today, I'm not going anywhere," she mutters, shaking her head. "It's too early in the season, and I haven't had a chance to work on any tricks. I'm not going to go over to Europe and kill myself." She leans against her snow-white Cadillac Esplanade, exasperated and spent.

All of which means nothing to the gaggle of teenage boys standing five cars away. One spies her, then another and another, until all are nodding excitedly in her direction. The 5'5", 26-year-old Dakides, clothed in the curve-obscuring canvas threads typical of her sport and with her long hair hidden under a wool cap, couldn't look less like snowboarding's It Girl. Yet the boys stand transfixed, mouths agape, as Dakides stews nearby. When they finally muster the courage to walk by, they can't help but rubberneck and whisper. It's clear from Dakides's blank, brooding stare, though, that she has no idea they were ever there.

Variations on this encounter -- awed onlookers stopped in their tracks, Dakides completely oblivious -- have played out all morning: at the coffeehouse, around the lodge, in the lift line. Now as before, Dakides remains unaware of the attention. As the boys exalt at their good fortune (teenage cool be damned!), Dakides studies her boots, kicks at the snow.

"Ah, let's go get a sandwich," she says, and she's off.

Truth be told, Tara Dakides would have every right to a big head, were it at all in her nature, and not only for her four Winter X Games gold medals -- a total she'll be looking to add to this week in Aspen -- and 12 additional first-place finishes in major competitions. During the Big Air finals at the 1998 Vans Triple Crown competition, her revolutionary, balletic backflip, a trick no woman had attempted in competition, fundamentally changed women's snowboarding, a mostly terrestrial endeavor to that point. It also altered the perception that female riders were less capable than their male counterparts. "A bunch of the guys were having drinks and watching the women's contest on a monitor," recalls Dakides's boyfriend, two-time Winter X Games gold medalist Kevin Jones. "I knew she'd been consistently hitting flips in practice, but when it happened on the screen, all hell broke loose in that bar. She'd made her mark, and we all knew it."

Given all that, along with the calls from Conan O'Brien and Howard Stern, and the magazine spreads of her in various states of undress, and the requests from the video-game folks and pinup poster photogs, Dakides could be forgiven if she were to develop a chosen-one complex. In many ways that's what she's become: the face -- and body -- of her sport, possessed of the magic crossover appeal.

It helps that she's beautiful: deep green eyes and toothpaste-ad grin; a hyperathletic body, biceps bulging and abs rippling. The adornments are vestiges of a rebellious, punk-rock youth -- pierced nostril and belly button, and an intriguing tattoo that snakes from her lower back around her torso. (It's a dragon's eye connected by scaly tether to an androgynous human, curled in a still-incomplete lotus flower. Don't ask.) Shirtless quartets of admiring males with T-A-R-A spelled across their chests greet her at finish lines; online chats often leave Dakides fending off marriage proposals and other, more salacious offerings.

"She can be a star," says Nova Lanktree, president of Lanktree Sports Celebrity Network, an agency that places athletes in commercial projects. "Not long ago she would've been just background talent. Now a good-looking extreme athlete is what an advertiser wants." Mountain Dew and Vans seem to think so, as does Hollywood: Disney had wanted her for a lead role in the snowboarding flick Out Cold, but her schedule interfered.

Beneath her growing global image, though, is a populist appeal that is quaintly local -- there's a pie named after her at the pizza joint in town, and you can order a custom latte at the Looney Bean with a simple "what Tara has" -- that speaks to a soulful character equal to her devilish charm. What's more, despite the burgeoning fame and an income estimated in the mid-six-figures, Dakides's standing among her peers is ironclad. Two years ago she won two coveted TransWorld Snowboarding Riders' Poll awards, based on votes of her fellow riders; last year she won five, including best overall rider. It's a respect she craves, for it proves to Dakides, as she draws the trick gap between the genders ever narrower, that she can win fans on talent alone.

"It used to be that women had to measure themselves against the dudes, but not anymore," says top pro Barrett Christy. "Tara is a big reason why." Adds 2001 Winter X Games bronze medalist Jenna Murano, "She's such a powerful rider that sometimes girls will come up to her and say, 'I didn't even know you were a girl.' She's always ridden that way -- aggressive, hard and fast."

"I never thought I'd get anything because of snowboarding," Dakides says with a throaty laugh as she surveys the living-room clutter of her three-bedroom Mammoth Lakes house. "The only thing I hoped for was my own pro-model board. Now I walk into my garage, and I'm head to toe in my [signature] stuff. It's crazy." She picks at a slice of cold Tara Dakides left over from the previous night. "It's pretty embarrassing," she says, offering a bite. "But the pizza's good."

It will always be the riskiest leap of her life. In 1992, at age 16, her blissful Mission Viejo childhood undone by her parents' messy divorce, Dakides, a high school dropout, sold her stereo for $300, bought a bus ticket, and -- with her snowboard gear and some clothes -- headed for Mammoth. She arrived after 2 a.m., with one number to call, that of a man who'd tried to pick her up months before. "I got lucky," she recalls. "Turns out he was cool. I got a job with a woman he knew, and I met a lot of my good friends."

She'd been snowboarding since age 13, and a youth spent on gymnastics mats and skateboards served her well. Still a bit rough around the edges -- short on cash, she shoplifted her first snowboard outfit -- Dakides found a home in Mammoth Lakes, thanks partly to a network of strong, independent women. She began picking up sponsors who would provide a free pair of goggles here, $100 there. "It was great," she says. "Here was this delinquent sport, perfect for a delinquent like myself."

"Snowboarding for Tara has been one big growing lesson," says longtime friend and former pro Rachel Turiel. "The last few years it's gotten tougher. Sponsors want her at all the events, all the parties. Everyone wants a piece of her. But she's so strong. When you're around her, you can't help but be inspired." Consider what preceded that historic '98 backflip: In '93 she tore her left anterior cruciate ligament, which kept her off a board for five months; upon her return in '94 she attempted the flip for the first time and broke a thoracic vertebra, nearly paralyzing her; and in '96 she was abruptly dumped by her sponsor, Morrow, in part because she wasn't meeting its expectations. That tested her resolve. "After I hit the backflip," she says, "I believed in myself again. I could look for new challenges."

She used the backflip for the last time in her double-gold performance at the March 2000 Winter X Games. At the Sims World Snowboarding Championships a month later she graduated to the tougher backside rodeo, an off-kilter, tumbling flip with a board grab, and won titles in Big Air and Slopestyle (her other specialty, a slalomlike event with jumps and slide rails). As inspiring as Dakides has been to her competitors, her technical expertise has proved dauntingly difficult to replicate. Equally hard to match is her exacting nature. She relentlessly drops F-bombs during poor practice runs; in competition she's a brooding loner, always idling before her heats -- no matter how bitter the weather -- outside the warm confines of the riders' tent. "I tried being nice, but it always felt forced," she says. "I just had to be me."

Ask politely, and she tells "that story," which teaches one thing: As superstar athletes go, Dakides is among the least self-conscious you'll ever meet. Just before the 2000 TransWorld awards in Las Vegas, she bought a pair of very tight pants; she found them so exotic that she promised her friends quite a performance should she win something. As she finished her acceptance speech, she strode from the podium, turned her derriere to the crowd, and invited them to "check out my ass." "After that," she recalls, "it was 'Ass, ass, ass,' all night long."

It's clear Dakides gets the joke. (Her cell-phone voice-mail greeting is in absurdly over-the-top surfspeak: "Really? ... Really? ... Wow, that's rad ... soooo killer. Like, totally awesome bitchin' stoked ... yeaaaah ... [Beep].") When Dakides and Turiel sit down to turkey burgers, Dakides has no napkin and so excuses herself, returning with the next best thing: a fistful of toilet paper. Still, the frivolity masks a fierce drive, one Jones would like to see her tap even more. "She gets so hectic now that sometimes she can't snowboard enough," he says. "But she's so good, she'll miss a week and still win. It's scary to think how much better she could be."

Though Dakides is unsure how much longer she'll compete, she says "having three more years like the last three would be great." She takes pride now in knowing how to pace herself, aware that her oft-ravaged body can absorb only so many more spills. "I don't feel invincible anymore," she says, sitting in the lodge, adjusting a substitute board. "And I still wanna shred when I'm good and old."

Which is to say, she wants to be like her 91-year-old great-grandmother, still alive and kicking (and driving and fishing) in California. Says Dakides, "She told me that when she was a girl and she wanted to play with the boys, she had to sneak a pair of pants out of the house to wear. Just so she could play with boys. Unreal."

With that, she cuts through a crowd of skiers and out the door, tiny and ferocious, and turning heads, always turning heads.

Issue date: January 21, 2001

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