Editor’s note: Readers nominated their all-time favorite Summit County athletes for Peak Performers: The Mount Rushmore of Summit County athletes. Voting is now live at SummitDaily.com/peakperformers.

Nominee: Steve Fisher
Sport: Snowboarding

Enchanted with snowboarding since the first time he picked up a copy of Transworld Snowboarding at the age of 5, Steve Fisher will go down in history as one of the most important riders in halfpipe’s formative years through the 2000s.

The Minnesota boy rose through the ranks on the United States of America Snowboard Association circuit before turning pro in 2002. Not long after, Fisher relocated to Breckenridge, where he brought an aggressive, yet smooth, style to the resort’s world famous pipe.

After he won a Junior World Championship in Finland in 2002, Fisher quickly staked his claim as a top competitor on the sport’s highest circuit, taking third place at the Snowboarding World Championships in Austria the following year. Then one year later, Fisher etched his name in winter sports history when he won the Winter X Games superpipe competition in Aspen. Throughout his career, he’d add several more elite-level wins, including several overall Grand Prix titles.

In 2007, Fisher joined snowboarding legends Todd Richards and Shaun White as one of only three riders to ever win multiple X Games Aspen superpipe gold medals. It was a redeeming accomplishment for Fisher after he broke two bones in his back a few years earlier when attempting a then-unheard-of 1260-degree rotation trick.

On the contest scene, Fisher is remembered as a competitor who always gave it his all and routinely went for his biggest runs in the pipe, rarely playing it safe. In Breckenridge and Summit County, he’s remembered as a snowboarder in the “Shaun White” era of halfpipe who went head on with the best talents and won his share of the world’s biggest events, inspiring one Summit local snowboarder after another along the way.