Winter Olympics: death-defying teen Tess Coady facing leaps of faith

Tess Coady is the youngest member of our 51-strong Winter Olympic team but she is in two of the most death-defying events.

Snowboarder Tess Coady during a training session in South Korea. Picture: Getty Images

Tess Coady weighs 55kg and most of that appears to be intestinal ­fortitude.

Coady, 17, is the youngest member of Australia’s 51-strong Winter Olympic team but she will take on two of the most death-defying events on the program, slopestyle and big air.

A Year 12 student at St ­Michael’s Grammar School in Melbourne, Coady will first tackle a slopestyle course that includes three sections of rails and three jumps, the last of which soars 20m in the air. Off that one, she hopes to do a double backflip, weather permitting. “There are some pretty crazy rails and jump take-offs with lots of angles, but it works well because it gives you that extra power on your spins,’’ she said.

Coady will be one of the first Australians in action in PyeongChang, with the slopestyle qualification scheduled for tomorrow, so she has already had several training sessions to familiarise herself with the course.

Bokwang, where the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events will be held, is renowned as a windy venue but Coady, light enough to be blown over by a stiff breeze, is taking every challenge in her stride. She is the reigning world junior champion in both slopestyle and big air and won her first senior World Cup medal in slopestyle at Snowmass, Colorado, last month.

Coady is the youngest member of Australia’s 51-strong Winter Olympics team. Picture: Steve Cuff

If anything, the big air event, which makes its Olympic debut in South Korea, is even more perilous. Competitors perform their best trick off one enormous jump, more than 20m high, having taken off from a ramp towering 49m.

“It’s got a much bigger run in than we usually have so you can get more speed,’’ Coady said.

“It’s like falling down from a 16-storey building,’’ University of California astrophysicist Marusa Brada says.

Coady, who has taken part in only a handful of big air competitions, estimates she will be travelling at 50km/h when she takes off but she says the scariest part is “the lift on the way up’’.

She plans to do a ­double backflip off that one, too.

She said landing that trick for the first time last year was “the best feeling I think I’ve ever had on snow’’. A former gymnast who took up snowboarding when she was nine, Coady said she had always had a daredevil streak.

“I love to push myself with ­anything. I always try to be better than I can be and I’ve always been competitive with my big sister.”

Seen as a future star, Coady has been sel­ected for PyeongChang mainly for experience.

Her best chance to win medals will come at later Games, but don’t count her out this time either.