“Anna did this switch backside 180 tail grab on the first day filming for Schnitzel Time at Kreischberg, Austria. Her boyfriend, Clemens [Millauer], who is also an insane rider, filmer and creative master-mind, came up with the idea of using those Astera lights for a night shoot, which turned out nice.” Photo: Sani Alibabic Words Spencer O’Brien “D id you book your flight yet?” Anna Gasser asks over the phone. It’s late September. “Not yet, Anna,” I reply. “I can’t really justify spending the money to go ride park jumps on a glacier in Switzerland anymore.” “That’s not a reason, book your damn flight and get over here,” she says. I don’t have much of a choice—it’s rare that Anna doesn’t get what she wants. She is a stubborn and singularly focused human who has accomplished more in her first decade of snowboarding than most athletes do in their entire careers. But she isn’t your typical “best in the world” athlete. Her craft isn’t honed in the gym alongside nutritionists and sports psychologists. Rather, her regime of bell-to-bell park days, year-round winters and schnitzel mit pommes has proved to be a winning combination. For her, every waking hour is dedicated to snowboarding. Anna hails from Millstatt, Austria, a tiny lakeside village where she grew up with her younger sister, Eva, and their parents, Lis-beth and Peter. Anna didn’t start snowboarding until her late teens after she turned her back on competitive gymnastics. She was searching for something that could fill her need for adrena-line without strict rules, and snowboarding fit the bill. She pored over European snowboard movies wondering how she could find a way into this new world. She stole Eva’s board and forced her sister to wait hours for her while she threw herself at rails and hucked backflips. In 2012, a few years after those first backflips, she got a spot at the O’Neill Evolution in Davos where she landed on her first podium with a backside 5. From there, she landed first-ever trick after first-ever trick and went on to dominate the competitive snowboard scene. She has sat atop the perch for a decade now and, despite operating in a competitive arena domi-nated by youth, Anna still has her foot on the gas. As I sit in the airport en route to Switzerland in early October (yeah, Anna got her way yet again), I think of the first time I saw the slightly sketchy, skinny blonde girl ride—the “who is that?” moment. We solidified our friendship after a six-hour day lapping the Whistler, BC, terrain park in 2014, running out of tricks to do. I remember the moment she surpassed me as a competitive rider, when I knew she would take the torch and carry it further than any of us thought possible. We talk a lot about trailblazers in this sport, and Anna Gasser is someone who has earned that title. But at only 32 years old, she’s too young to receive it just yet. Anna was the first woman to land a double cork, the first woman to land a triple cork, is a two-time Olympic gold medalist (big air in 2018 and 2022), four-time X Games medalist (in both slopestyle and big air), and so much more. After one of our park sessions in Saas-Fee, we sat down to talk with so much more on the horizon. Anna was icing her ankle with a bag of cream cheese. She’d hurt it riding that day. It didn’t seem to faze her, much. 068 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4: Page 68
