Tanja Frieden won the women’s snowboard cross gold medal at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.
Frieden finished ahead of Canada’s Dominique Maltais, while Switzerland’s fellow rider became one of the event’s first Olympic champions. Snowboard cross features several competitors racing simultaneously over jumps, berms and banked turns, unlike parallel events, where riders race head-to-head.
The Turin Games were the first Olympics to award medals in snowboard cross. Frieden’s victory was especially notable because she had already won a silver medal at the 2001 World Championships. She retired from competitive snowboarding soon after the 2006 season.
A common mix-up is confusing Frieden with Lindsey Jacobellis, the American who won the women’s snowboard cross gold medal at the 2006 Olympics? Jacobellis actually won silver in Turin and later took Olympic gold in 2022.