When Adam Lambert blew the candles out on his birthday cake to celebrate his 25th birthday he was thunderstruck by the realisation he was only five years off hitting 30.

It made him take a long, hard look at his life’s priorities. But while some of his contemporaries with a similar mindset might have focussed their energies on buying a house, climbing the corporate ladder or settling down, Lambert’s mind zeroed in on the need to . . .  win.

“I’m sure, as many young adults can attest, turning 25 is a milestone,” said Lambert, now 28, and preparing to compete at his third Olympics in the snowboard cross event.

“It was post-2022 Beijing Olympics and I sat down with my sport advisor and we were like: ‘well, you know, what do you want? What do you want to get out of it? You’re not getting younger – as harsh as that sounds.’

“[And] I’m not getting younger. And yeah, she asked, ‘what do you want to get out of this? What do you want to do with this?’ And I said, ‘well, I want to win.’ She said,’ ‘let’s do it.’”

“Everything I did from then on was more intentional, and I knew why I was doing it.  I understood the reasons why it was going to improve my snowboarding. For me as an individual, me as an athlete, that understanding was very important for my motivation levels as well as my commitment.”

Lambert, who declared he’s preparing for the challenges of Milano Cortina ‘the fittest, strongest, and best snowboarder’ he’s ever been, revealed an important part of his recalibration was the decision to treat snowboarding as his job.

“Treating training like a job is a bit of a touchy subject for some people,” he said. “Some people say, ‘we don’t want to treat it like a job; we love it – work sucks’ . . . you know what I mean?’

“But for me, I’ve grown up working in some kind of fashion or another, whether it’s for the family business or whatever. I always enjoyed it to some degree, and I feel like when you treat [snowboarding] like a job, you turn up and you get the job done.

“When you treat it like, ‘oh, it’s fun’ – which [for] some people it works, for me, I need to turn up, I need to know this is what I have to do today . . . get the job done, get out, come back the next day and do it all again – best job in the world as far as I’m concerned.”

Lambert, who harboured dreams of becoming an Olympic swimmer when he swam for the local club in Jindabyne, set his sights on becoming a Winter Olympian after finishing high school at 18.

“I took my life savings, which was pretty measly, and it took some help from my family as well to get me overseas where I needed to be to compete,” he said. “I spent everything I had, and I was like, ‘whatever, we’ll give it a crack this year . . . if it doesn’t work out, then we’ll go back to doing something else’. Luckily for me, it really it worked out.”

However, Lambert revealed one of the biggest challenges was being in the company of athletes he’d grown up admiring.

“The people I was around, it was all quite overwhelming,” he recalled.

“I was all of a sudden around all these people that I’d known on TV for like, years, and they’re inviting me to go hang out at a cafe or this and that. ‘it’s just casual ‘- for me, it’s not casual. It doesn’t feel casual, you know? It’s like far out . . . [I’ve] got to impress these people and, you know, make them like me and all this stuff.

“It just happened so fast because I went from saying, ‘what the hell? We’ll give it a crack, see if it works out’ and then it worked out and then it kept working out, and I never really had time to look back on what had happened until 2020, when I blew my ACL during COVID.

“I stopped, I slowed down, and probably from that year on, everything started to click into place a bit more. Everything slowed down. Everything became more intentional.”

Lambert, who started snowboarding when he was 18 months – ‘I imagine my parents got me out of bed one day, strapped a board to my feet and let me go down the mountain’ – said it was a benefit that he had no pressure on him as a young athlete.

“It definitely helped,” he said. “Obviously, I put pressure on myself when I was competing because I wanted to do well for myself but, I never looked at snowboarding as something I was going to do forever. And I never really looked at, thought about, what I was going to do forever anyway.”

Lambert, who has been clocked screaming down the mountain at over 100 km/h, described the thrill of his sport was knowing he was experiencing something few people will ever enjoy.

“The joy of flying down the mountain is once you get up to speed everything kind of falls away a bit and all you can hear is the wind; you can hear the wind blowing past you, and you can feel the vibrations in the snowboard – not a lot of people get to experience it.

“Obviously, you can strap on a snowboard and go down a hill as fast as you want, but to be in control and to be like, so comfortable and confident in your own ability . . . it’s really something special.”

After finishing 29th at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games and 22nd at Beijing four years ago, Lambert is applying his ‘let’s win it’ philosophy to Milano Cortina.

“It’s important to be ready for that mentally and physically,” he said of competing before a global audience.

“But mentally especially, because out of nowhere, all of the eyes are on you, and everyone knows it. Some people crumble and some people, they step up and they make it happen.

“My focus this year is being one of those people that step up.”

Daniel Lane, NSWIS

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