Slopes & Strokes: The journey of two-time Olympic Snowboarder & PGA of Canada Pro, Liam Moffatt

By: Nkele Martin 

It’s over in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of metres of tight corners, twists and turns, bumps and jumps. Where just one minute separates racers from the start gate and the finish line. That’s the sport Liam Moffatt knows. 

So, when he drove across the country in 2018 to start a life in British Columbia, golf was an afterthought.

The Nova Scotia native swapped one coast for another with one goal: to further his snowboarding career.

The then 20-year-old was an elite-level athlete, an Olympic hopeful, and most importantly, a fourteen-handicap golfer.

Eight years later, Moffatt has achieved that Olympic dream, twice. But as he shaved seconds off his race times, he shaved strokes off his rounds. And now, it's golf that lies in his future.

Team Canada's Liam Moffatt competes in snowboard cross seeding at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Italy on Thursday, February 12, 2026. Photo by Mark Blinch/COC

Born and raised in Truro, Moffatt began snowboarding at the age of seven and was quickly drawn to snowboard cross, a form of time-trialled racing.

“It's super simple to understand once you watch it,” Moffatt said over a Zoom call, proudly sporting his team Canada toque. 

“You time trial in with just yourself on the race course, through banks and turns and jumps, and then you get a time, and that puts you into a bracket of head-to-head racing [against] four guys, and the top two advance through the bracket all the way to the finals.”

Moffatt remembers his parents shuttling him to and from Ski Wentworth, a small mountain around 50km Northwest of Truro, where he started his journey.

“They [Ski Wentworth] gave me a lot of support, and my parents were driving the hill every chance they could get,” he said.

After rapid improvements and impressive results, Moffatt decided to begin stricter training at 15 before attending Carrabassett Valley Academy, a specialized ski and snowboard high school. 

Taking the sport more seriously paid off. Moffatt became one of Canada’s best snowboard cross athletes, winning domestic races and securing multiple top-10 finishes at the International Ski & Snowboard Federation (FIS) World Championships.

Already a top-tier snowboarder at the time, things started to come together quickly in 2021. After an eighth place finish in the world championships, Moffatt realized he was in a position to qualify for the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing.

“It was very last minute. I had gotten top 10, and then another pretty good result. Then, at the last qualifying event before the Beijing Games, I got another ninth place. I woke up [the next day], and that was more than enough to put me in that third spot for the games,” Moffatt said.

After finishing 19th in the Men’s Snowboard cross and 9th in the mixed event alongside Tess Critchlow, Moffatt was looking for another successful Olympic cycle.

But this time, snowboarding wasn’t his only focus.

The ‘opposite’

Moffatt’s interest in golf was sparked while working at Nova Scotia’s Fox and Harbour Golf Club between the ages of seventeen to nineteen years old.

During that time, the self-proclaimed sport nut with an “addictive personality” started trying to figure the game out.

“I started realizing ‘I like this game a lot, but I'm pretty bad at it,’” he said.

 “But I really never committed to start getting better.”

That commitment came after his move to B.C., when he started working at Big Sky Golf Club in Pemberton.

After enjoying his time at Fox and Harbour, Moffatt chose Big Sky looking for some cash. But over the years, the sport nut who was obsessed with technicalities and nuances in snowboarding, found that same obsession with golf.

“I worked a substantial amount of time at Big Sky, four or five years. And through that time, I played a lot with our directors of golf and just got better and better as the years went on,” he said.

“I think the first goal was like, ‘oh, I want to get to a ten, and then I want to get to a single digit, and then I want to get under five, and then I want to break par.”

At six-foot-five and 225 pounds, Moffatt plays hard and fast.

“I play golf like an athlete,” he said.

“I hit the ball hard. I'm six foot five and 225 pounds, everything is built around me swinging the club pretty fast. I drive the ball well, I have horrendous short game, and I putt pretty well,” he said.

Although he credits some people for tips, Moffatt is largely self taught.

“I probably made it harder on myself than I could have, you know, I should have probably gotten some help,” he joked.

What made improvement even harder than his stubbornness was his schedule during the golf season. 

Moffatt had to manage eight hour shifts at the course with lengthy gym sessions, mandatory rest periods, and a weeks-long trip to the South American slopes every summer.

“Every time I leave, I kind of feel like I'm starting from scratch. Even now, I've never been able to swing a club all summer long,” he said.

Moffatt took his first playing ability test in 2023 to understand the pressures of tournament golf. He didn’t pass, but by then, his passion for the sport was cemented. 

“That sort of competition is something that I really enjoyed and I found out really quickly that I need to work on quite a bit,” he said.

“I started playing a little bit more serious matches just to understand that pressure, because it's nothing like what I feel in snowboarding.”

That pressure, drawn out rounds with an inconceivable amount of variables, is one the snowboarder had to train himself to handle. But it’s also why he fell in love with golf.

“Snowboarding is very much, ‘you do your run, you're at 110% and then you finish, and you get to go all the way down to zero, and then build yourself back up to that threshold of performance. It's a very up and down trend.

“Where I find tournament golf and trying to keep yourself in a performance attitude and be locked in for four hours straight, you have to hit that 70% threshold and stay there for four hours straight.

“I think one of the reasons why I love the game of golf and why I was so keen on it so early, is because it is so much the opposite of what snowboarding is to me,” he said.

While there are many opposites, Moffatt said a competitive mindset is universal, and golf keeps his mind primed for competition on the mountain.

After Beijing, Moffatt spent four years jumping from winter snowboarding to summer golfing – balancing the two when they overlapped – and achieved milestones in both sports. 

In May, he successfully completed his PAT and became a PGA of Canada professional.

And, just months later, he qualified for the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympic Games.

With the Beijing Games being severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Moffatt made sure to savour his second Olympic experience.

Situated in Livigno, three hours north of Milan, Moffatt was part of a separate opening ceremony procession led by his good friend and Ski Cross Olympian, Marielle Thompson. 

“I managed to get some screen time on CBC and wave to everyone. And I probably got 25-30 messages, videos of me just giving a wave. It's so special, and you just try and soak it all in,” he said.

After a nearly fanless competition in 2022, Moffatt had thousands watching him race in Livigno, including friends and family.

He exited the competition before the quarterfinals, finishing just a few board-lengths behind a qualification spot in a photo-finish race. He was disappointed in his result, but he didn’t let it overwhelm him.

“Regardless of the emotions that I felt after the race and how unhappy I was with my riding that I brought to that finals day, once it was all over and I did my interviews, I went and gave my parents a hug, and it felt like ‘alright, now the morning is over, just could go enjoy it now.’ So I mean, to have that and share that with them is pretty special,” he said.

He shared that moment with his community back home, too.

“Hundreds of people sat at 7am at my home mountain and ate pancakes and watched me race at the Olympics. It's just wild,” he said.

Moffatt spent the rest of the morning in the stands, bib still on, watching the sport he has dedicated his life to.

“Just to be a part of the fan base and not just an athlete for that split second was pretty awesome for me. To bring it all back and just watch snowboarding.”

With the competition behind him, Moffatt spent his final day as a tourist, walking kilometres on end, taking in the city’s sights, and catching Canada in the women’s hockey semifinals.

“That was awesome. Just trying to make some memories there while I had the chance, which was kind of the goal for that day.”

Moffatt returned to the west coast, but not for long. 

He’s since travelled to the North of Turkey and Austria for races, and will compete in the FIS World Cup Finals at Quebec’s Mont-Sainte-Anne to close out his season.

While he’s focused on the races ahead, the season wraps up - and has always wrapped up - at a convenient time for the newly professional golfer.

Now an Apprentice Professional at Whistler Golf Club, Moffatt teaches more than sixty private lessons per summer, mostly at its academy.

“I really enjoy teaching,” he said. “It's one of the more interesting things I've probably done in my life.

“I don't think there's any other sport where you can get a beginner and an eight iron, and they can hit ten shanks in a row, and then all of a sudden they flush one, and it goes 150 yards, and they look back like they've seen a ghost, because they didn't know they were capable of hitting that shot.”

Moffatt, who will still be balancing intense training with teaching and playing golf this season, is looking to further improve his game and is currently focused on understanding where he loses and gains shots.

“I'm far from where I want to be in my skill of golf, but I'm also pretty fortunate to have the skill I have and the athletic capability to figure it out as far as I can,” he said.

As for another Olympics? Moffatt isn’t too sure. But his general manager, former Olympic basketball player Alan Kristmanson, gave him some poignant advice. 

“He said, ‘When you're done, you'll know.’ And I think that's a really cool thing for him to say, and something that I think about quite a bit, because I definitely don't know right now. So that means I'm not done.

“I think another, another four years, and the Olympics is within reach if I want it. And I don't really have an answer for you if I want to do that, not because I don't have the passion and the will to do that, but I'm also, you know, weirdly enough, excited about what's next in golf.”

Moffatt says he plans to get more education in and around the sport, grow his golf-oriented social media presence, and work his way up in the industry – possibly into a managerial role.

“There's so many people in my sport that don't have much of a plan after they retire from snowboarding. To be totally honest, I spent a couple pretty sleepless nights trying to figure out what I really wanted to do when I'm done snowboarding, and I can say with confidence now that I have so much relief and gratitude that I've picked this path, and this is what I want to do. I want to work in the golf industry for probably the rest of my life, as long as it'll allow me to,” he said.

“I'm just so happy that I've, like, found my passion, and I know that no matter how long I do my snowboarding for, I have this to fall back, well, fall forward to.

“This is a huge accomplishment for me and I'm just so excited for what's next.”