Livigno: Josie Baff does not lack confidence. That much was clear not long after Australia’s second gold medal of Milano Cortina 2026 was draped around her neck, when she was asked how amazing she felt.

“I would like to say that I can’t believe it, but I kind of can,” she said.

Olympic snowboard cross champion Josie Baff.© Getty Images

“I feel like I deserve it. I put in a lot of hard work, so I knew I could do it, but to actually have the medal around my neck is very, very cool. There’s been a lot of sacrifice, a lot of sweat, a lot of tears; probably not as much blood.

“It’s definitely something that I’ve been working towards for a very long time, and my team has been helping me achieve that every step of the way.”

Snowboarding has been in Baff’s life since pretty much day dot. Her father, Peter, is an experienced coach who has mentored Olympians including Scotty James, Alex “Chumpy” Pullin, Jarryd Hughes and Valentino Guseli. She remembers watching Torah Bright, who was also born in Cooma, win gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and feeling inspired; she was seven, and now she is her equal.

Baff was Australia’s first winner at the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics. That was the moment when she abandoned her first love – ski racing – and went all-in on snowboard cross. Good decision: on Friday, she became an Olympic champion after claiming a series of big scalps on route to a thrilling victory at Livigno Snow Park. It’s Australia’s first gold medal in this discipline, one of the country’s most highly funded winter sports.

Ranked world No.2, it was not unforeseen that Baff would win. But until relatively recently, the missing piece for her has been consistency. For that, she has a team of three sports psychologists to thank – and her partner, Eliot Grondin, a 24-year-old snowboarder from Quebec, for suggesting she see one. This Australian gold comes courtesy of a partial Canadian assist.

Josie Baff crosses the line to claim gold in the women’s snowboard cross final.© Getty Images

It was on Grondin’s recommendation that Baff sought assistance in that department – not because he thought there was something wrong with her, but because of how helpful it had been for him.

The pay-off has been immense. She only made a “tiny little shift” by refining her warm-up and pre-event routines into something more predictable and mechanical, but tweaks like that can turn good athletes into champions. Having crossed the line 0.04 seconds faster than Czechia’s silver medallist Eva Adamczykova, those less-than-one percenters have added up to something huge.

“I was having a good start, bad start, good start, bad start, and I just thought that was just normal,” she said.

“And then Eliot said, ‘If you can work on your mental space and have the consistency all the time, then that’s better.’ So I guess it was kind of like connecting the inconsistency with the mental side. Honestly, sports psychology, it feels so simple when people are telling you how to embrace something, or to change something. You’re like, ‘Duh, that makes so much sense’.”

Josie Baff on the podium for Australia.© Getty Images

Here’s another example, something that sounds like useless advice on face value: for the past year, Baff has been journaling every day, writing down the things she’s learned. When she looks back on them, the feeling is profound. It’s always more than she realised.

“It just helps to show that you’re moving forward every day, even though you feel like you haven’t necessarily achieved something new that day … identifying that, it builds the underlying confidence in yourself,” she said.

On Thursday, Grondin won his second consecutive silver medal for Canada in the men’s cross event. He gave Baff a few insights on the peculiarities of the track, but really, she had it covered.

Josie Baff’s partner Eliot Grondin after he won silver in the men’s event a day earlier.© AP

If anything, it was the reverse: “He definitely copied one of my turns that I did in training,” she said.

An early and uncharacteristic stumble in the seeding round, leaving her ranked 17th in a field of 32, did not rattle her. Baff won her first knockout bracket, then survived a tight photo finish in the quarter-finals, a race in which she spotted an opportunity to overtake one of her rivals on a turn about a third of the way through the course, but didn’t do it, and immediately regretted it.

“I went back up to the top and I told my coach, ‘If I’m in that situation again, I’m going,’” she said.

It came up twice. In the semi-final, Baff was third when she undercut two others to prevail and give herself a shot at a medal.

In the four-woman big final, on the same turn, she cut inside of Switzerland’s Noemie Wiedmer to snatch the lead, and rode it all the way home. She knocked out some heavyweight names along the journey, but as she put it afterwards: “If you want to win, you have to beat everyone eventually, anyway.”

Over the hill on the last stretch, she could hear a lot of cheering, most of it coming from the 35-strong contingent of family and friends, many of whom were wearing pink beanies, in honour of the colour of the helmet she has worn since she was a kid.

“I was hoping the cheering was because there was a little gap between me and the people behind me, but you never know,” she said. “I couldn’t see any shadows. I was like, ‘OK, I think I’m here.’”

Then came the waterworks. Baff threw her arms into the air, collapsed into the snow, and started crying – tears that she’d held back.

“Even going into the big final, I had an emotional release, and I was like, ‘wow, who was that?’ It’s not something that I normally do,” she said. “It’s all of the four years of hard work, and I guess that all kind of comes out. When it works, it feels pretty great.”

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/i-deserve-it-josie-baff-stuns-to-win-snowboard-cross-gold/ar-AA1Widl1?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6981d26d7209472ca44897ae52333859&cvpid=8a5a7b9b122149e3c4d9caa8bd96cd72&ei=13#image=1