With only three hours to prepare, @Valentino Guseli has pulled off a trick he has only attempted one other time on snow, to qualify in 12th place for the Men’s Snowboard Big Air Final. Knowing he needed to pull out a huge trick with his third and final jump to secure a place in the final, Guseli stomped a massive Switch Backside 1980 Tailgrab to score 91.50. That took his total score to 163.00 - one point more than the 13th placed athlete. It was an exceptional start to Australia’s Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic campaign, which was not scheduled to start for another two days. After falling agonisingly short of automatically qualifying for the Big Air and Slopestyle competitions, Guseli was only expected to compete in the Halfpipe, scheduled for 13 February. However, following a training injury which forced Canadian Olympic medallist, Mark McMorris to withdraw from the competition, Guseli was the only Snowboard Halfpipe athlete with a top 30 Big Air World Cup finish and enough FIS points to gain a start in Big Air. Receiving the official news just three hours before the event commenced, the 20-year-old Aussie leapt at the opportunity to stand at the top of the Big Air jump and squeezed in his first ever practice jumps on the colossal ramp in the hour before the competition commenced. "I found out last night that there was a chance I was going to get in after unfortunately Mark had a bit of a spill and wasn’t able to compete tonight,” Guseli explained. “When I found out I was getting the spot, then I just wanted to take that spot and go as far as possible with it. “By the time I dropped in for my first run, I only had eight runs on this jump, so I’m pretty stoked with that.” Guseli opened his Olympic campaign with a Switch Backside 1620 Double Tailgrab, scoring 73.25 and putting him in 15th position after the first jump. Ever the showman, the 20-year-old fanned the cameras in a cloud of snow after sticking the landing before performing a handstand flip to excite the fans at Livigno Snow Park. His second jump, a Backside 1620 Drunk Driver scored 71.50 kept him in 15th position. With only the top 12 advancing to finals, Guseli knew he had to pull out all the stops if he wanted a chance to secure his spot. “I was planning to do an 1800 instead of a 1920. Me and my dad [Guseli’s coach] were talking about it and he was like ‘dude, you might have to go the 19[20] to get the score’ and I was like ‘dude, I don’t know if it’s worth it’? “What I thought was: I’m not going to go and try something like a Hail Mary that I could get destroyed on and miss out on Halfpipe... “And then I thought for little bit and then I thought: ‘it's the Olympics, man’. “Once I decided it was like, let's go! Then I ended up just finding flow state pretty easily when I dropped in and snapped it, grabbed, came around, saw the landing, stomped it. “Sometimes things just happen for you when a lot of work accumulates into a certain moment, and I guess it felt like a lot of hard work paid off in that moment.” Having only landed that trick on snow once before – over 18 months ago before his ACL injury - Guseli’s Switch Backside 1980 Tailgrab scored a massive 91.50 to secure his position in Saturday’s final. Guseli will retun to the ramp in the Men’s Snowboard Big Air Final at 7.30pm local time on Saturday 7 February (5.30am AEDT Sunday 8 February).
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