Teenage snowboard star Valentino Guseli targets triple success at 2026 Winter Olympics

It was late March when Australian teenager Valentino Guseli’s phone buzzed.

It’s the morning of the final round of the FIS Snowboard World Cup in Silvapalana, Switzerland.

Guseli is in the mix and on the hunt for a third Crystal Globe — the trophy awarded to the athlete with the best results from the annual World Cup series.

The then-18-year-old was sitting in second place in the overall park and pipe World Cup standings — a combined championship tallying up the triad of snowboard freestyle disciples: half-pipe, slopestyle and big air — behind Japanese rider Ryoma Kimata.

Despite being in contention, the defending overall champion and slopestyle winner from 2022/23 had enjoyed, in his own words, not quite the season he wanted.

“I found the season before last was better,” Guseli tells ABC Sport.

“I felt like I did fall off a little bit last season.”

The year prior, Guseli became the first man to win World Cup medals in all three disciplines in a single season and just the fourth ever to do so over the course of his career, and also won his first World Championships medal in Bakuriani, Georgia.

Perhaps, given that success 12 months prior, it is reasonable to call it a bit of a dip.

With all this spinning through Guseli’s mind, the affable teen turned his attention back to his phone.

On the screen was a somewhat incongruous scene: Two Crystal Globe trophies perched on a handrail, with the stunning vista of autumn waves crashing onto craggy headlands and a slither of pristine beach — typical of the south coast of New South Wales — in the background.

“They’re waiting for another one,” the accompanying message, from Guseli’s father Ric, read.

It was all the incentive Guseli needed.

Olympics triple the plan

It’s pretty clear that Guseli is not your standard teenager. He’s one of the greatest snowboarding prospects on the planet.

He said his 2023/24 season was not quite where he wanted it to be, yet it still contained plenty of high points.

A 1-2 finish with fellow Australian Scotty James at the Laax half-pipe was one.

Winning a first-ever half-pipe World Cup gold in Calgary was another.

And winning a third Crystal Globe was a third, which marries nicely with Guseli’s ambitions for the next 18 months, when he hopes to make history in Milan-Cortina.

Guseli’s career is still fledgling — he has started just 32 World Cup events, earning nine podiums.

But even before he made his debut at the Winter Olympics aged just 16, Guseli has been described as one to watch.

At those Games, he mixed it with some of the all-time greats on the Secret Garden half-pipe in Zhangjiakou, finishing in a hugely credible sixth spot behind Australia’s silver medallist Scotty James and America’s Shaun White.

His first World Cup victory came later in 2022, winning the Edmonton big air.

Guseli honed his nascent snowboarding skills while growing up in Canberra — getting out on a skateboard in the city when he wasn’t hitting the slopes.

Now he calls Dalmeny, on the south coast of NSW, home, where he has also shown an affinity for surfing.

Trips home are increasingly fleeting though, brief interludes between traipsing around the mountains of the northern hemisphere, carving through powder-like snow and pushing the limits of what is possible on a board.

Partly, of course, that is down to an increasingly troubled snow season in Australia, with a second-successive winter of disappointing snow across alpine areas. 

Guseli, like many riders of his generation, is concerned about the warming of the planet, and is an ambassador for Protect our Winters, a non-profit highlighting the impact of climate change.

“It’s not what you want,” Guseli says.

“The Aussie season is always pretty fun, but this year we had the worst season I think ever recorded.

“We still had a lot of fun shredding there, I just try and make the most of it.

“It’s definitely something that’s very important to me.

“This season we had the worst season that we’ve had in a long time, and then the season before was pretty bad too, and I just, like … it would suck to see seasons keep going in this direction.”

While the environmental impacts on snow sports will remain an issue, of more immediate concern for Guseli is the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games of 2026, which loom large on the horizon.

The qualification window for the 2026 Games starts this season, with the snowboard World Cup kicking off on the scaffold city ramp at Big Air Chur on Saturday night in Switzerland — the culmination of a two-day party where the snowboarders vie for attention with DJ sets and live performances from some of Europe’s best bands.

With Olympic qualification spots on the line though, every event carries an increased level of importance, particularly given Guseli has set himself an extraordinary task.

“I am aiming to qualify in all three disciplines that I do; slopestyle, half-pipe and big air,” Guseli says with calm confidence.

“I’m not sure if anyone else is aiming for that this season, but that’s what I’m planning to do.”

Competing at a high level across all three disciplines is extraordinarily difficult, making the feats of US-born Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu all the more impressive when she medalled in all three events at her home Games in 2022.

Only Korea’s Lee Chaeun is a realistic chance to shoot for all three events in 2026.

Lee was the only snowboarder younger than Guseli to compete at the 2022 Games, finishing 18th and missing the final as a 15-year-old.

The Korean star has since been crowned world champion in the half-pipe — edging Guseli into second place by just 0.5 points — and will hope to defend that title when the World Championships return in Engadin and St. Moritz in 2025.

He also won two golds at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympics in Gangwon, in half-pipe and slopestyle.

The competition is rising.

But then again, so is Guseli.

“Hopefully, I’ll just do my best, winning once I get there to the Olympics and get some gold medals,” he says.

“That’s the plan.”

Good things come in threes

With Kimata missing the finals in Silvapalana, and Guseli finishing third, the precocious teenager did add a third Crystal Globe to his collection at the end of last season.

Guseli’s ascent to the highest echelons of the sport continued apace.

It’s pretty obvious that athletes like him do not come around all that often.

But the entire reason Guseli is a triple-threat rider is down, in some small part at least, to his father Ric’s insistence that his son be allowed to test himself across all three formats for as long as possible.

Without having met him, Ric comes across as a pretty astute guy.

It’s not just because of his prescient prediction of the addition of another trophy to the family’s coast-side collection, but the ethos he has instilled in Valentino.

“My dad helped me come to this conclusion that it’s all snowboarding,” Guseli says.

“You know, people specialise and people choose just one to focus on, but they [the separate disciplines] do all kind of help each other.

“Lots of people told us that I should specialise when I was younger and my dad was just like, ‘No keep doing everything,’ and at times I wanted to listen to those other people over my dad, I was pretty young, I was like 10, 12 [years old].

“But then I realised the advantage I had over lots of my competition.

“I get more good results in half-pipe than the other two, followed by slopestyle and then big air. 

“But I think I’m more than keeping up [with the rest of the field] and, after a little bit more training time, I’ll keep keeping up through the season.”

‘I wanna win a crap-tonne more’

Talking with Guseli by video from his training base in Switzerland, it’s hard to shake off a very distinct impression: The teenager that you are talking to is desperately cool.

With his broad, ever-present and easy smile, Guseli exudes a relaxed composure suggestive of a laid-back attitude that, if it were any more pronounced, would leave him virtually horizontal.

But behind that laconic demeanour is the same steely resolve that binds all top athletes: A thirst for victory.

“My plan is to get to the level where I can just consistently win,” Guseli says, an assertive statement somewhat at odds with its calm delivery.

“I’ve only won two World Cups so far [Edmonton big air 2022 and Calgary half-pipe last season], and I’ve had a few more podiums.

Guseli says a typical day sees him “go shred as long as I can,” spending hours up in the snow before hitting the gym and incorporating over an hour of yoga into his daily routine.

“It requires a lot of hard work, but the process is super fun, and you’ve gotta enjoy the process,” he says.

“You’ll be working hard, but you’re just hanging out with your mates, ripping. 

“So it’s like, super fun and a bit more chill at the same time.”

Guseli’s versatility, and deep-seated sense of enjoyment on the snow, undoubtedly help him push boundaries.

Whether it’s taking learnings from the slopestyle into his half-pipe performances, or the dare-devil confidence necessary for success in big air, Guseli’s innate desire to push the boundaries makes him such a thrilling snowboarder to watch and such hot property for sponsors.

Earlier this year he launched himself 11.53 metres into the air off a purpose-built hip — a world record — and holds the record of 7.3 metres off the side of a half-pipe.

It is disputed that Kaishu Hirano went higher at the 2022 Olympics, although there is some question over the fact that the Japanese rider’s transponder was attached to his knee, and not the board, as was the case when Guseli set his mark in 2021 at the Laax Open.

He also became the first board rider to complete a front-side 1620 in a half-pipe.

“I’ve learned so much since I did my first World Cup,” he says.

“Now I’m just working on some tricks that are a little bit more innovative and unique, which I think will definitely help me to consistently do pretty well.

“It’s pretty cool because there’s lots of new ways of doing stuff coming out.

“There’s only so much you can rotate in the trick in an amount of airtime, so it kind of slows down a little bit as it gets to a bit of a ceiling there.

“But then people are bringing in totally different axes of rotation, so there’s heaps of things coming out that people haven’t done still. So it’s pretty cool.

“I’m just doing whatever I can to be as good as I can, compete well and hit podiums and win.”