Mid-final phone call lifts Anna Gasser to consecutive Big Air golds

As Austria's Anna Gasser prepared for her final run in Tuesday's (15 February) snowboard Big Air final at Beijing 2022, she was guaranteed her second-straight Olympic medal in the event.

But she was missing one thing that helped her soar to gold four years ago at PyeongChang 2018: her boyfriend Clemens Millauer.

Millauer, an Olympic snowboarder himself, broke his ankle earlier in the Games and headed home for surgery.

"When I heard about Clemens' injury, everything changed. I did not think that much about the competition anymore, my perspective changed. I thought, there are more important things than the medal," said Gasser, according to LAOLA1. "Clemens is such an important person for me, my support person. I did not know how I was going to make it."

She added, "In South Korea, he was the one who calmed me down. But I talked to him on the phone ahead of my final jump. So in a way he was part of my last jump."

Already in a medal position, Gasser used her phone call with Millauer between runs for a last-minute confidence booster.

"Ahead of the final jump, he said: 'You know how to do this, just let it rip,'" she said of the call.

And that she did. Gasser laid down a Cab Double Cork 1260 for the first time in her career and scored a massive 95.50 to overtake New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, the slopestyle gold medallist.

"The winning strategy was maybe just having fun and not caring about the result that much, and just caring about showing my snowboarding today," Gasser said afterwards. "I wasn't playing it safe, I was trying to give it all."