How does a boy who was raised on Maui since he was 3 months old grow up to make an Olympic team for the faraway country of New Zealand and in a sport that doesn’t even exist in Hawaiʻi: snowboarding?

With a Kiwi father, many trips to see his grandparents Down Under and competitive athleticism honed on the skateboard parks and big waves of Maui, according to Lyon Farrell, who has dual citizenship.

The 27-year-old is among the 2,900 excited athletes from around the world who are going to Italy to compete in the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games that run Feb. 6 to 22.

Cheering for Farrell will be Maui childhood friends Cody Young, who is currently the No. 14-ranked surfer on the World Surf League qualifying series, and Kai Lenny, a world-renowned big-wave surfer and paddleboarder.

“It’s pretty wild,” Young said. “I always tell people I have a friend that’s a pro snowboarder who grew up on Maui. And they’re always, like: ‘What?’ So it’s an amazing story.”

Lenny, now 33 years old, remembers the friends going on a trip to Fiji when he was about 10 and Farrell was about 4. The pair learned to fly kites on a Fijian beach, helping start a friendship that is still a tight bond.

“It’s just so fun when I talk to people about Lyon, that he’s a pro snowboarder who was raised essentially here on Maui,” Lenny said. “It’s such a conundrum, but he’s so wicked talented at what he does. It’s a testament to his hard work. I think the hardest thing most people do here is leaving someplace like Maui to pursue their dreams somewhere else, because we obviously don’t have snow slopes here.”

This week, Farrell tried on his Olympic gear. The reality started to sink in.

“All of these massive competitions, X Games, U.S. Open, Dew Tour, all these big comps … You anticipate them so much and then they kind of come and go before you even realize it,” Farrell said Wednesday during a phone interview from Laax, Switzerland, where he was at a training camp with the New Zealand Snowboard Team. 

“I feel like this is one of those moments where I know how special it is and I don’t want it to like disappear too quickly,” he said. “I just want to kind of enjoy every day.”

Farrell will compete in two events: big air, a series of three single jumps off a large ramp in which competitors must spin left on one jump and right on another, with the best two scores counting; and slopestyle, which is a downhill course with three rails and three jumps where competitors do tricks on all of the features. Competitors get two runs in slopestyle qualifying and three in the finals, with the single best score counting in each round.

Farrell appears primed to do well at the games. He finished seventh in slopestyle at the Laax Open on Jan. 18, the final World Cup event before the Olympics. He was also ninth at a big air event in Steamboat Springs, Colo., on Dec. 12. 

He plans to try a couple tricks that have never been landed in competition at the games. He also noted “most of my podiums (top 3 finishes) have come in Italy.”

In slopestyle training in Austria last year, he became the first person to pull off back-to-back 1800s (five full rotations), once to the left and then on the next jump the same thing to the right.

“I’m hoping to do back-to-back 18s,” at the Olympics, Farrell said. “That’s the dream run. Obviously, if I can build to that, and the weather allows for it, and all systems are go, I’m gonna push for doing that.”

If he does, he said it could be the first time that’s ever happened in competition.

Farrell is just the third Olympian from Maui since legendary swim coach Soichi Sakamoto trained Olympians in the Pu‘uēnē irrigation ditches in the 1940s. 

Lauren Spalding made the U.S. Olympic team in 2004 in kayaking and Vernon Patao was a two-time U.S. Olympic weightlifter in 1992 and 1996.

On Maui, Farrell became an accomplished skateboarder and surfer as a young boy. Hi-Tech Surf Sports on Maui started sponsoring him as a skateboarder at the age of 8 and he grew up routinely surfing noted local spots with Young and Lenny.

But it was not until he was 13, during a trip to New Zealand to visit his paternal grandparents, that he discovered snowboarding.

He soon started chasing a professional snowboarding career and in 2014 joined the New Zealand team, winning a world junior silver medal in the half-pipe in 2014.

“But at the time it wasn’t a fully structured program,” Farrell said. “It wasn’t something that had a lot of (coaching) support.”

So as his success mounted, Farrell soon switched to the U.S. snowboarding team, and was on it for the next eight years.

He had his sights set on making the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics for the United States. But on a fateful day in June 2021 — during a three-week trip home to Maui to see his mom, U.S. citizen Angela Cochran, a world champion windsurfer in 1989 and 1991 — he went to the Pukalani Skateboard Park and badly injured himself.

“I did this trick (on a rail) called a ‘Front Smith’ and I kicked my board out thinking I was going to put my foot down on the bank, but I put my foot down on the flat after the bank and I just kind of folded over my knee,” Farrell said.

He tore his anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in his right knee and was out for nearly 13 months until his return to competition, another day he remembers perfectly: “July 1st, 2022.”

With the Beijing Winter Olympics long over, he returned knowing his future in the sport would be competing for New Zealand.

By 2022, New Zealand had improved its coaching support for team members. And Farrell said he had already started thinking about the switch to the Kiwis following the COVID-19 pandemic shut down of much of the world prior to his injury.

“The U.S. was amazing for helping me progress my riding 100%,” he said. “I love the U.S. team, but it just didn’t feel right inside. … I really wouldn’t have gotten into snowboarding if it wasn’t for my dad (Campbell Farrell) being from New Zealand.”

Farrell added: “I just really connected with who really helped me at the start and why I snowboarded. New Zealand was just the place that everything just kept pointing back to. … It was my roots there and the support and friendships I had made.”

He also has plenty of supporters from Maui.

Young, the pro surfer, said he could always tell that Farrell had elite athleticism when they would spend countless hours at skateboard parks around the island as youngsters.

“Lyon worked really hard,” Young said. “And he was such a good skateboarder when we were younger. So I think he’s just a really naturally talented, gifted person.”

Farrell comes from athletic genes. Just four months ago, his mom finished second in the professional Aloha Classic Windsurfing event at Hoʻokipa Beach Park on Maui’s North Shore at age 60, and his 54-year-old father still surfs large waves often at Peʻahi, also known as Jaws, on Maui.

Now, Farrell is just six days away from realizing his dream at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

A day before the Winter Olympics’ Opening Ceremony in Milano, he will be competing in big air on Feb. 5 at the Livigno Snow Park, about 140 miles from Milano where the snowboarding events takes place. He will be competing in slopestyle on Feb. 16 and 18, also at Livigno Snow Park.

Kim Ball, the owner of Hi-Tech Surf Sports, keeps a large picture of Farrell snowboarding on the wall of his Kahului store. It is one of only two non-surfing pictures in the store.

“He’s been on our skate team since he was a little grom,” Ball said. “He was very talented at an early age, one of those special kids. … You can just tell when they’ve got that extra moxie or whatever it is, the talent. So, we’ve been following his career for a long time.”

Farrell never forgets his Maui roots that he represents “every time” he rides. It is with the aloha spirit that he travels the world to ride the waves on snow.

“If I wanna do anything as a representation of Maui is I just wanna show up with my heart open and really just be present and just be kind to every person I meet and go in with an open mind and just have fun,” Farrell said. “I feel like that’s the cool part about growing up on Maui and also in New Zealand. It’s a Pacific Island culture.”