Grateful for the pressure: Snowboard cross world champ Éliot Grondin hunts for elusive Olympic gold
Éliot Grondin has won almost everything there is to win in the sport of snowboardcross. This February, he’s out to capture the one thing missing from his trophy case: Olympic gold.
Grondin has been hard at work at a training camp in Austria ahead of this weekend’s start of the World Cup season in Breuil-Cervinia, Italy. His first goal is to begin the season “ready to rock,” but the two-time Olympic medallist is focused on one thing above all else.
“Obviously, there’s the Olympics [for my] third time. So, it’s a big one, which is super exciting,” Grondin said. “And for sure, the goal is to finish my collection of medals there.”
The 24-year-old from Sainte-Marie, Que., already owns silver and bronze medals from Beijing 2022, but he’s made it clear that his sights are set on the most prestigious prize in his sport – and it’s hard not to believe he can achieve it.
Grondin is a proven winner at every level of his sport, beginning with a world junior championship gold medal in 2021 and is now coming off back-to-back World Cup overall titles. All of that was punctuated by his first world championship gold-medal win last season.
Coming into an Olympic year as the undeniable favourite, is he taking any confidence from his extended run of success, or is he starting the season with a clean slate?
“A bit of both, I would say, especially after the last couple of years,” Grondin said. “It’s good motivation when you don’t really want to train as hard some days, but we try to start fresh every year, and look at things that maybe didn’t go as well as we’d hoped, and find a way to get those better.
“Overall … it’s nice to remember what I’ve done and how I’ve done it, but also find new ways to get better.”
Watch live coverage of the snowboard cross World Cup events from Breuil-Cervinia, Italy, beginning on Saturday at 5:30 a.m. ET. For full details on snowboard cross coverage this season, check out the CBC Sports broadcast schedule.
Grondin has improved by leaps and bounds, starting his Olympic career as a 16-year-old at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games where he was the youngest member of the entire Canadian Olympic contingent.
Now with two Games appearances under his belt, the 24-year-old has experience on his side – and he also has it in his corner. Since 2019, Grondin has been coached by Maëlle Ricker, a gold medallist at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and 2013 world champion.
Grondin said Ricker’s mentorship is invaluable because every situation he finds himself in, she’s seen it all before.
“What’s nice is she’s been through it all. She’s been everywhere I’ve been so far. So, I’ve got somebody that knows what’s happening, what’s going on, she’s been through that in the past,” Grondin said. “I think I’ve been working with her for so many years now, I think the relationship we have, like, she knows me so well that she knows what’s going on, [without] really talking to me.”
Grondin has ‘the ultimate recipe’
Ricker first saw Grondin compete at the 2017 junior world championships in the Czech Republic, where she and two-time Olympic medallist Dominique Maltais took notice of the snowboard cross prodigy.
“Back then, he sort of hadn’t filled out yet; he was like the skinny guy, but you could already tell he had really, really good touch on snow with his board,” Ricker said. “I remember having a conversation with [Maltais] right after, we both sort of stopped racing and she’s like, ‘oh, you have to see this young Quebec kid. He’s gonna be really, really good.’”
Ricker said her star pupil has since developed every attribute a successful snowboard cross racer could ever hope for – both the physical gifts and mental fortitude needed to succeed in a sport that’s famously unpredictable and highly chaotic.
“[Éliot] kind of has the ultimate recipe; physically, he’s a machine. He’s got the genetics that are really good for being dominant in snowboard cross … it makes him just a little bit of a beast. He’s somebody that loves to compete, he thrives under pressure,” Ricker said. “He’s matured a lot, tactically. He’s a lot calmer [and] has really good strategy when he’s on course with his competitors.
“Before, he was always really, really fast, but maybe a bit more erratic, maybe a bit panicking in traffic. He’s definitely calmed down and found a maturity with racing amongst all the men on tour.
WATCH | Grondin wins Olympic silver in photo finish:
“Every year, you can see [Grondin] gaining more and more experience with sort of the mental side of the sport.”
Grondin may be striving toward an Olympic title, but Ricker said he’s chasing his best performance every time he lines up at the starting gate.
“The last few years, we’ve had the World Cup Finals basically right in his backyard, and it’s not by coincidence that he always steps up to the plate and does a really, really good performance there,” Ricker said. “I think that shows that no matter what’s going on, when the time is there to perform and when the stakes are high, that’s when he really finds that extra focus that he needs in the gate to get the job done.
“When the chips are pretty much all on the line, he’s just zoned in. And he loves it, too. You can see it in his eyes. You can see when the pressure is on – that’s when he’s thriving.”
Every second counts, and Grondin knows that better than most. He came agonizingly close from having an Olympic gold medal hanging from his neck at the Beijing Games. A photo-finish in that 2022 final may have left him with a silver medal, but it also left him motivated.
The 23-year-old Canadian snowboarder says winning a silver medal at Beijing 2022 acts as motivation to top the podium at Milano Cortina 2026.
Striving toward the one thing missing from your resume as an athlete can create increased expectations and extra pressure, but Grondin believes his situation to be more of a blessing than a curse.
“There’s always pressure, for sure, [but] there’s a couple ways to look at it,” he said. “For me, I’m kind of grateful to be in the position that I can feel this pressure. Not that many people on the planet get to feel that in their lifetime, in the position that I am in right now.”
The two-time Olympic snowboarder tells CBC Sports’ Anastasia Bucsis about what the support of his community means to him and how he lost the gold medal at Beijing 2022 by a ‘photo finish.’
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