Nick Baumgartner is not fearless.

At 44 years old, he by far is the oldest athlete on the U.S. snowboard cross team. He didn’t make it this far by denying his fear, but by learning how to embrace it and use it.

That approach carried Baumgartner to his first Olympic gold medal at the 2022 Beijing Games at age 40, long after most athletes would have called it quits.

Now, Baumgartner has his sights set on a fifth Olympic berth at the Milan Cortina Games. He enters 2026 as one of the favorites to make the U.S. team, having finished 5th at the 2025 World Championships. 

“I am afraid of things and I'm chasing that,” he said at the Team USA Media Summit. “I do things that scare me, and a big thing I'm trying to teach the younger generations is if you're doing a sport like snowboard cross, it cannot be the only thing that scares you.”

He primes his mind to handle fear just like he conditions his body for the physical demands of the sport. Mountain biking, Baumgartner explained, is one way he attempts to approximate the sensation of standing at the summit of an Olympic run.

“It trains my eyes to look far ahead, trains my peripheral vision to look below me, … it keeps me ready,” he said. “When I get back on my snowboard and the door opens in a race, I don’t hesitate. If you hesitate, it’s too late.”

Besides the obvious parallels between two activities that involve racing down a precipitous downward slope at breakneck speed, mountain biking helps him because, unlike snowboarding, he particularly is not good at it.

“I’m not the best mountain biker in the world. I think it’s important to scare yourself and to be on that edge,” Baumgartner shared.

While simulating fear is an integral part of his training, Baumgartner has grown smarter about managing risk as he gets older.

For one thing, he doesn’t crash nearly as much as he used to. When he does, his body is ready for it.

“I know better and I'm smarter about what I'm doing and my training,” Baumgartner said of his approach. “When I crash, with my gains and all my maxes higher than they've ever been, I'm still strong and my body is built for crashing.”

“I'm not trying to test that,” he added.

For many years, Baumgartner balanced elite competition with pouring concrete — a side hustle that particularly is not conducive to aging joints and hard, icy landings. The Olympic champion still pours concrete today, just not as frequently.

“Trying to stay young and pouring concrete do not go together,” he said. “It would have been very tough had I not won that gold medal to fund this and to keep doing this.”

Even after establishing himself as a veteran on multiple Olympic teams, snowboarding was not bringing in enough money to support him and his son, who was born the same year he began competing.

“I get asked all the time how I made it to this level from where I came from,” Baumgartner said. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a region characterized more by its brutal winters than Olympic pipelines. “People think it’s a disadvantage. I think it’s our strength. We have to work harder for everything we get.”

Baumgartner still commutes an hour and a half to the gym every Monday and Thursday, then stays the night in his van in order to get another workout in the next morning.

Still, he has no plans to leave Michigan. Despite traveling to over 40 countries, Lake Superior remains the “coolest thing” he has ever seen.

Baumgartner enjoys telling everyone how great the Upper Peninsula, or “the U.P.,” is, but insists the magic of the place and the people who live there cannot adequately be compressed into words.

“They’ll give you the shirt off their back, even when it's 40 below zero, which it always is.”

Everyone back home cheered him on when he came home from three consecutive Olympics empty handed. After he finally won gold, the parade they threw him was 70 miles long.

“It's something I worked for for so long in my life, and to finally knock that off after years of falling short, nothing could have muted that celebration,” Baumgartner said.

He has been a public speaker since 2011, but after his success in Beijing, the calls came pouring in — speaking engagements, endorsements and even a book deal.

Baumgartner never saw that one coming.

“It's hard not to question, like, who the heck's going to want to read my story? Right?”

A lot of people, it turns out.

Journalist Jeff Seidel had written an article years earlier about Baumgartner, his relationship with his son and the poignancy of finishing 4th at the 2018 Olympics. Every time Baumgartner read it, he cried.

“I didn't get a medal. Fourth place is the worst ever, but that article that Jeff wrote was my medal,” he recalled.

When he was approached about writing a book, he hired Seidel to be his ghostwriter. His memoir, “Gold from Iron: A Humble Beginning, Olympic Dreams, and the Power in Getting Back Up,” was published in 2024.

The process of putting his story onto the page not only helped Baumgartner make sense of pivotal moments in his life, but empowered him to distill what he has learned for his teammates, many of whom are over 20 years his junior.

When new snowboarders join the national team, Baumgartner asks the coaches for time alone with them.

“I tell them, if you have questions, you come ask me,” he said. “I don’t care if I’m five minutes from my Olympic qualifying run.”

Some veteran athletes might worry about being pushed out by younger, nimbler riders. Baumgartner hopes they will push him that hard.

“When I show up and I beat these kids and they have to go home and tell their parents they lost to someone their age, that's inspirational,” he said. “They're going to put in the work so that they come back and they're going to be better.”

That means he has to get better, too.

After 20 years of competitive snowboarding, Baumgartner has gotten pretty good at that. He not only has found ways to stay on top in a sport that only has gotten more difficult, but he has brought others to the mountaintop alongside him.

“They have all the talent in the world,” he said. “On paper, they should crush me.”

Often, they don’t. Baumgartner has seen many athletes quit before they start to see success.

"I've put in the miles and I've been in the trenches for too long. I try to tell them to stick with it," he said. "It's coming, it's coming."

In a sport that is all about moving as quickly as possible, Baumgartner exemplifies the value of patience and waiting for your moment to arrive.

When his finally did, he was ready — and is still working to stay that way.