Dubuque, IA – While most three-year olds are chilling out in preschool all day, Wesley Muresan is on the slopes at Iowa’s Sundown Mountain ski area three to four times a week, schooling people eight times his age in the ways of rail slides and alley-oops as he makes his way toward becoming a pro snowboarder.nAccording to his Facebook fan page, which touts over 800 fans, Muresan is a three-year-old, 34-pound, three-foot-nothing snowboarder… who rides in the big terrain park. He hits jumps and slides rails, grabs his board while he’s getting some air, butters and links his S-turns like no other ninja midget before.
A fan of two-time Olympic gold medalist Shaun White, Muresan often talks about his plans to go snowboarding with Shaun in his secret halfpipe.
“I wanna snowboard with Shaun White in his secret halfpipe and do tricks,” Wesley said. “Halfpipe is my specialty. I like it. I go really fast like Superman.”
“Wesley talks all of the time about how he is going to ride with Shaun in his secret halfpipe. He is very serious about this, even describing how they will take a helicopter to get there,” said Danelle Muresan, his mother. “Wesley believes Shaun is his good friend and that he will call him on the phone sometime to go shredding together (again, his three-year-old brain) and Wesley says that what he likes about Shaun are his backflips.”
The kid, without a doubt, will eventually have the skills to shred with the best. On March 5, Muresan competed in his first competition – a rail jam for 9-year-olds – where he took second place by ripping onto the butterbox switch, turning 180, and landing the jump off the box.
With his own “gold medal” (a golden dollar sign) around his neck, the youngster celebrated his first comp and podium by heading to the bar, stating, “I’m going to buy two victory kiddie cocktails for me and Devin [his brother].”
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the young rider is the fact that he didn’t strap into his first set of bindings until this season.
“I wish I could say that his dad, Alin, and I are really cool snowboarders and we taught him everything, but this is not the case,” Danelle said. “We bought snowboards for our kids at the beginning of the season – our season here in Iowa is mid-December to mid-March – and were amazed at how quickly they picked up the sport.”
So quickly, in fact, that even Wesley’s snowboard instructors, Nelson and Nolan Howe, had a hard time keeping up with him, especially on their first encounter.
“Nelson told him that he would take him on the bunny hill and see how he did. Wesley had already been snowboarding a few times. Wesley said, ‘NO. I’m gonna do the halfpipe.’ Nelson had raised his eyebrows a little when I asked him to give Wesley some private instruction, but he soon realized that Wesley was not the typical three-year-old on a snowboard. Nelson had him sliding rails by the end of that lesson.”
His riding became so advanced that his family took he and his older brother out to Colorado, where Wesley was able to ride down the Imperial Bowl at Breckenridge, take a snowcat up to the top of the back bowls at Keystone and shred down, ride the superpipe at Copper, work some moguls, learned how to do a horizontally tipped rainbow rail, a 180 jump off the rail, alleyoop in the halfpipe, practiced buttering on the rails, and had a lot of fun.
According to his mom, “It is really amazing how much more he could progress with the more challenging terrain found in Colorado.”
The young rider’s rare abilities have garnered him a lot of interest, not only on the internet where some of his YouTube videos have over 20,000 views, but also on shows like The Today Show, Bill O’Reilly, The Rachel Maddow Show, and NBC News.