Nick Baumgartner, 44-year-old Olympic snowboarder, is ‘the old guy you shouldn’t count out’
When the subject of his age comes up, Nick Baumgartner smiles. He knows the questions are coming. For four years, that’s all anyone wants to talk to him about.
Baumgartner, a Michigan native, enters the Milan Cortina Olympics as one of the world’s best in snowboard cross, an event where competitors jostle for position on a series of banked turns, hills and speed bump-like jumps, all trying to reach the finish line the fastest. Four years ago, Baumgartner won an Olympic gold medal in mixed snowboard cross with American teammate Lindsey Jacobellis.
But the fascination with Baumgartner lies not only in his talent. It’s about how he maintained it at an age considered, by snowboarding standards, old.
When he won gold four years ago in Beijing, he was 40 years old. Next month in Italy, when he competes in his fifth Olympic Games, Baumgartner will attempt to do it again at age 44.
He’s old enough to have a son graduate from college and a spot on the U.S. national team for 21 years — longer than two of his U.S. Olympic teammates, 17-year-old Ollie Martin and Alessandro Barbieri, have been alive. In Italy, at 14 years old, he will be the oldest American snowboarder.
“I play a sport against kids,” Baumgartner said. “Snowboarding is dominated by youth, and to have a guy like me, the elder statesman, I love it, man. It makes me proud.”
Baumgartner is also part of a trend. Advances in training and recovery have allowed older athletes to fight back at ages that would once have been associated with retirement. Tom Brady won a Super Bowl at age 43 in 2020. This NFL season’s MVP might be 37-year-old quarterback Matthew Stafford. LeBron James turned 40 last season, then earned second-team All-NBA honors, making him one of the league’s top 10 players. At these Olympics, some of the most high-profile athletes on Team USA are older ones, including skier Lindsey Vonn, 41, and hockey star Hilary Knight, 36.
“I’ve been playing this sport for 21 years and I’m still the underdog, even after a medal,” Baumgartner said. “Because now I’m older, so everyone counts me, and I love he. Fall asleep on me and tell me I can’t, and we’ll show we can.
The focus on Baumgartner’s age, 44, and whether that might prevent him from keeping pace with younger competitors at Milan Cortina, amuses Josh Baumgartner, the second eldest of the five Baumgartner siblings. Staying in the competition despite a significant age difference is all Nick has ever known, he said.
Nick grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, just outside the town of Iron River, population 3,000, as the youngest of four brothers, with a sister just a year behind him, and he experienced “a different type of childhood than most people experience,” his brother said. The brothers were each two years apart, but the younger siblings never had a baby; Nick remembers being the victim of many beatings from his older brothers.
“You want to win? You deserved it,” Josh said.
The siblings operated under a loose set of rules. They had to return home at nightfall to check in, but were not required to stay home. If the kids’ adventures were going to require crossing the local road, U.S. 2, to get to their favorite haunts like Sunset Lake, the parents wanted to know. But otherwise, the children were free to wander around Iron River, play soccer in their yard and basketball on the playground, or roam the woods and swamps.
“We had our limits on where we could go, but it covered miles,” Josh said. “Amazingly, we all survived it, to tell you the truth. »
When Josh was 10 years old, he said he got a snowboard for Christmas and he remembered that soon his brothers wanted to snowboard too. Nick got so good that he quit the Northern Michigan University football team to become a professional snowboarder. At the same time, in 2004, Baumgartner became the father of a son, Landon. Nick competed in the 2010, 2014 and 2018 Olympics, but left each Games without a medal. Each missed opportunity left Baumgartner wondering how many more chances he might have.
It’s not for lack of trying.
Baumgartner likes to say he will outperform any other runner, and his brother suggests that’s not hyperbole. To finance the expenses of professional snowboarding, Baumgartner spent his summers working for a Wisconsin-based concrete company, where he poured decks, sidewalks and driveways. In 2021, a few weeks before the Beijing Olympics, Baumgartner received a call from Josh, a contractor in Aspen, Colorado, asking if he would come to Colorado to help pour vertical walls. For eight hours, Nick shoveled concrete from several walls. A 10-foot section of 6-inch concrete pipe can weigh about 400 pounds, Josh said; that night, they were constantly maneuvering about 80 feet of pipe, up and down the walls.
“It was the craziest work day of our lives,” Josh said. The work ended at midnight. In the morning, Nick had left for snowboard camp.
He could recover quickly from hours spent hunched over pouring and leveling concrete when he was younger, but in his late 30s, Baumgartner could take weeks to recover.
If the concrete work did not make it easier to take care of his body, neither did his training methods. The gym where he has long trained is in Marquette, Michigan, nearly 90 miles from his home. To reduce travel, Baumgartner began training at the gym on Mondays, spending the night in his van and training again the next day before returning to Iron River. He repeated the journey on Thursday.
That’s why Baumgartner described his “heartbreak” in an emotional interview after racing at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, when he failed to medal in individual snowboard cross.
“I’m 40,” Baumgartner said. “I’m running out of opportunities.”
A few days later, his life changed when he and Jacobellis teamed up to win gold. He left China and flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin, a 140-mile drive from Iron River. Halfway to his hometown, residents who had been warned in advance of his arrival began to gather along the road, applauding Baumgartner as he passed. As the car got closer to his house, Baumgartner’s son happily filmed his father in tears as he saw more and more spectators lining the road.
“Craziest thing I’ve ever experienced,” Baumgartner said. “I’m still not that famous. You get about three hours from my house, that’s it. But at the Iron River grocery store? The most famous guy!”
Once the festivities were over, Baumgartner had to find a way to maintain his advantage over his competitors for another four years. As a young professional, Baumgartner considered himself more of a soccer player than a snowboarder, and his training reflected this. In the weight room, he focused on strengthening his chest, triceps and biceps some days, and his legs and back some days, instead of exercises targeted to the demands of snowboarding.
Broad-shouldered and thick-necked, with a mustache and five o’clock shadow, Baumgartner still looks like a football player. But he no longer trains like one. The increased funding from sponsors and other sources, such as dissertation writing, that Baumgartner received after winning gold in Beijing reduced his reliance on side jobs. With more time and less wear and tear, he’s found “much more efficient ways to do what I do, so that I’m not wasting time or effort or energy doing something that’s not directly related to my sport,” Baumgartner said.
He developed a very effective way to train this winter, just steps from his front door, by building a snowboard cross course around his house. He descends from a shelf of hardened snow and ice, carves banked turns and pumps his legs to traverse a series of “roller” hills, and races to the finish.
His training targets the same fast-twitch muscles that power sprinters, “all working on that explosiveness to try to be fast from the start and have that power,” he said. At his gym in Marquette, he sprints while pulling a weighted sled, then does box jumps. He’ll still do squats and bench presses like he did in his youth, but now he does them by monitoring a gauge that can tell him how fast he’s pressing the bar; a reading below 0.6 meters per second tells him something is wrong and he may be too tired. To recover, Baumgartner will use a sauna, often five days a week.
“[In a] friction-gravity sport, mass tends to win, right? he said. “So you just have to be able to make things happen. I always tell people this bus will go down fast, but I have to get it out of the garage pretty quick. So as long as I can keep that speed and stay in the chase, I don’t care if I’m…behind. I’m always on the hunt.
And he stayed in the medal hunt because his years of failure at the Olympics forced him to be patient, he said.
“I’ve seen so many kids who have all the talent in the world to beat me, and on paper they should crush me,” he said. “And they never beat me, and that’s because I put in the miles.”
“I’ll see kids who I think are going to win, and it takes them six years to win, and some give up before that happens. And I try to tell them, stick with it. Stick with it. It happens. It happens. But it’s so frustrating for some people to get over that.”
Baumgartner understands that he won’t be able to compete at his current level forever. He’s already thought about what he’ll do when he’s done snowboarding: a motivational speech. But he also knows that the Winter Olympics will return to the United States in 2034, in Salt Lake City. Can he snowboard into his 50s?
He smiles again. He considered this possibility.
“In my mind, this would have to be the best story of the Olympics,” his brother Josh said. “The old man, you shouldn’t count on him.”
