Lindsey Jacobellis

The amazing Lindsey Jacobellis is the most-decorated female snowboard cross star of all-time. She holds an incredible 20 gold medals from the world’s biggest snowboard tournaments — the Winter Olympics, the World Championships, and the Winter X Games. In the 13 Winter X Games held between 2003 and 2016, Jacobellis won gold at ten of them. She is also a five-time World Champion and won the snowboard cross and mixed snowboard team cross gold medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Unsurprisingly, she has a huge social media following, including 469,000 Instagram followers.

Jacobellis was born in Connecticut in August 1985. She was a keen skier until a fire destroyed the family’s weekend home and all their ski equipment when she was eight years old. Unable to afford new skis, the family got new snowboards instead, and so her new career path became set. She attended a Vermont prep school that focused on training winter athletes, but Jacobellis was the only female snowboarder there. This didn’t hinder her though, and she won her X Games gold medal in 2003.

Jacobellis appeared in the first of her five Olympic games in Turin in 2006, winning silver, but further medal success would elude her 16 years — she missed out on a bronze medal by 0.003 seconds in 2018. In 2022, she finally went the distance and took two golds, giving her an unequalled medal cabinet. Away from competitions, Jacobellis has also appeared on reality TV, taking part in a charity edition of MTV’s The Challenge and finishing runner-up, raising $5,000 for a leading anti-animal cruelty charity.