2ndwind Academy Podcast
2ndwind Academy Podcast
115: Anna Pixner - Speed Skateboarder to Championing Gender Equality in Extreme Sports
What does it take to skateboard at 100 kilometers per hour down treacherous terrains while breaking gender barriers? Join Ryan today as he sits down with Anna Pixner, Austria’s fastest woman on skateboards. Anna is a two-time world champion in downhill speed skateboarder, coach, writer, and advocate for greater recognition and equality for women in extreme sports. Known for her technical prowess and fearless approach to some of the most challenging mountain roads, Anna has mastered the art of navigating hairpin turns at breakneck speeds - all while advocating for greater recognition and equality for women in this male-dominated sport.
From a shy, thrill-seeking child to a world-class athlete who pushes her limits of both physical and mental endurance, Anna turned her passion for extreme sports into a mission to amplify female representation in extreme sports. She desires to make a broader impact, not just within the sport but also in encouraging people to step out of their comfort zones and embrace challenges. She uses her platform to inspire the next generation of athletes, challenge stereotypes, and promote a more inclusive portrayal of women in extreme sports by offering workshops, coaching, and creating her own high-quality media content.
Tune in to learn more about:
- What led Anna to discover her love for downhill speed skating and her first impression of this extreme sport
- The gender disparities, the lack of female representation in extreme sports, and the role the media plays in perpetuating stereotypes.
- A sneak peek of the different styles within the sport, including racing and free riding, and the technical skills required to navigate steep, challenging mountain roads.
- Why it’s harder for female athletes than their male counterparts in extreme sports
- The psychological aspects of downhill skating and how she uses mental strength to manage fear and push her limits on the track.
- How Anna is championing female athletes in media to challenge stereotypes and encourage a more inclusive portrayal of women in extreme sports.
…and so much more!
Are you looking for Career Clarity for your next step, for more information, or to book a consultancy, make sure you check out www.2ndwind.io
Links:
Website:https://www.annapixner.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annapixner
Anna, what made you do it the first time, the very first time that you saw someone doing it? What made you think that's something I want to do?
Speaker 2:To be honest, the first time I saw it I was just really impressed that it's possible If you see someone going that fast on a skateboard and then, just like it looks so controlled, to stop. I was really impressed by that and I was like, wow, I kind of want to find out how that feels.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Ryan Gonsalves and welcome to a Second Wind Academy podcast, a show all about career transition through the lens of elite athletes. Each week, I invite a guest to the show who shares their unique sporting story. Please join me to delve into the thoughts and actions of athletes through a series of conversations. Don't worry, there's plenty to learn from those of you that aren't particularly sporty. Elite athletes are still people after all. Let's be inspired by the stories of others, by the stories of others.
Speaker 1:On today's show, I've got Anna Pixner. Now, anna Pixner is quite the extraordinary downhill speed skating champion, hailing from Innsbruck in Austria. Now, today we're going to share or go through her story, her passion for skating, overcoming her shyness and finding mentorship across competitive areas and competitive skating events. We're actually going to explore the unique challenges faced by women in extreme sports and the ongoing effort to amplify media representation for female athletes. Now for Anna, this means balancing rigorous training with academic pursuits and she's going to offer a rich perspective of how she's transitioned from just being a passionate skater to a downhill two times world champion. Now, anna, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Brian.
Speaker 1:Absolute pleasure to have you on here. Thanks for taking out the time. I know you are a busy young lady traveling around the world competing, so thanks very much for coming on today to share your story and tell us a little bit about what you are fighting for as a as a world champion female athlete well my sport.
Speaker 2:It's pretty unknown, I would say, or maybe it's a little too extreme to be mainstream, and since I started I haven't actually had the chance to ride with other women that much. So from the beginning I always questioned that in a way that I wanted to find out why there are not more women doing it, except the fact that it's quite extreme women doing it, except the fact that it's quite extreme. But you do have a lot of other sports with a lot of risk involved that have a lot more women. So yeah, I always ask myself how come there's not that many women in my sport? And I found out for myself that what's missing a lot is to have women represented in media because, also, if I try to look for role models or for, like I don't know, people to learn from, there's not that much to find. So that's why I kind of made that goal for myself to change that and to put more effort into creating media to make it seen more that there's not only guys skating super fast, but there's also women doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's quite an important message. So it sounds like for you, you are one of the first women to compete in this sport and, as part of that, you've taken it upon yourself to be the voice to amplify as you say, but to amplify the image of female speed skaters.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know it makes me interested, then? Because, as you said, there are not many women. There are not many females in this sport. What attracted you to take up the sport in the first place?
Speaker 2:To be honest, I guess I was always quite into more extreme sports, or most of the sports that I was into as a child there was not that many women doing it Like. I grew up in Austria so I've always been skiing a lot, but in skiing I always went more into direction of like doing tricks and going off piste. And then I started climbing and then, yeah, I've always like mostly hung out with boys in my free time because there was more boys interested in those activities. But now if you look at it, it's not necessarily like that. There's a lot of women climbing and skiing and like doing all that stuff. So I think already, like in the last 20 years, there was a big change in that.
Speaker 2:But what attracted me especially to this sport?
Speaker 2:I think for me it was mainly the feeling that I got even from the first time trying, I just learned how to slide, like that's how you control the speed by putting the board sideways and like kind of just with the friction of the wheels you stop. And that's such a good feeling that I always used to be quite scared. And to learn that to like control the speed in such a quick way, it kind of showed me that my fear is relative, that if I know that I can control my movement I'm not as scared of the speed, which really surprised me, and I think that was something that made me want to keep going, because I wanted to explore that more, to like see, yeah, how far can I push my fear like, am I still gonna feel scared, even if I practice that a lot, and that that just seemed like really interesting to me. More than in in other sports where you're mainly like pushing your physical ability, I felt like in this sport it interested me to push like my mental ability yes, wow.
Speaker 1:So, anna, it makes me wonder. To me, looking at what you do, it looks dangerous. Like you say, it is an extreme sport. What kind of speed do you get up to when you're going downhill or at your fastest time?
Speaker 2:it kind of depends on the context, like if I skate open roads, which is like the training we don't really have training tracks or anything like that, so we need to skate on roads with open traffic and then I usually don't go that fast. So it's usually around 60 70 kilometers per hour, but on races you usually tend to push it a bit more and there it does go up to like 100 kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1:Depending on the track, it can be even a little bit more you know I have to have to jump in because little bit more. You know I have to have to jump in because, having watched the videos, watching you, take the hairpins. That gets me honestly, because I just imagine you flying off because you couldn't slow down, you couldn't turn. In terms of injuries, what's the worst incident or injury that you have had?
Speaker 2:yeah, it definitely happens once in a while that you don't slow down quickly enough and you just fly out. The worst one that I've had I hit a guardrail, I didn't slow down enough and then I just slid out on the road hitting the guardrail and I broke two vertebrae and four ribs. I punctured my lung. It was quite an intense experience, but I think that that pushed me as well to get even more into the technique, because I do feel like the more you are in control of of the technique, the the the smaller is the chance that you don't manage to break yeah, well, that's quite an important message.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like for you, you are one of the first women to compete in this sport and, as part of that, you've taken it upon yourself to to be the voice to amplify, as you say, but to amplify the image of female speed skaters I do still find it quite challenging, especially, yeah, because to keep pushing a lot you need time and you need to be able to pay for your bills somehow.
Speaker 2:And as a woman, I do find it even harder to get that support because a lot of times you don't really get taken that seriously, or at least along the way it happened to me quite a lot that I had to prove in a lot of different ways that I mean it.
Speaker 1:Because when I watch it, you're maybe 10 centimeters off the ground, probably not even that much, going down at 100 kilometers an hour and you're braking simply by moving yourself or moving the board, certainly across the road. Anna, what made you do it the first time, the very first time that you saw someone doing it? What made you think that's something I want to do?
Speaker 2:To be honest, the first time I saw it I was just really impressed that that's possible, like if you see someone going that fast on a skateboard and then, just like it looks so controlled to stop. I was really impressed by that and I was like, wow, I kind of want to find out how that feels.
Speaker 1:I think it's great and certainly very brave to want to get into that, and so to achieve the success that you have done is quite amazing, and so to achieve the success that you have done is quite amazing. Before we talk about that, I am interested in sort of you growing up a bit and, you know, trying to understand how you got into the studies that you're doing today. So, as you grew up in Innsbruck again famous for speed as far as I'm concerned did you from a sporting perspective? What did you hope to achieve?
Speaker 2:well, actually I haven't really been that competitive in a way that I I'm quite competitive against myself, I would say, because I'm a very perfectionist person.
Speaker 2:So the way that I think usually it's just that I want to reach my personal best, which, to be honest, I never achieve it, because once I reach a certain goal, the next goal is already higher and I kind of feel like it's a never ending process that I never really just get to that point where I want to be, because I'm at a point and I always want to be at the next point, and I think, like it was like that from the beginning and it's still like that, that I don't feel I I've reached a goal.
Speaker 2:Now I think that I came, I be, I became better, but I haven't reached it. Like I think I started racing mainly because of the opportunity to have a Racing, mainly because of the opportunity to have a closed road, to practice a little more safe and also to be able to connect with other people who are doing that sport. Especially, like it inspired me a lot to see other women that once I started traveling to the World Cup events, I saw that there is actually a lot of other women that are really good at this too. It's just that they live very far away from me, and it it definitely like gives me a big push to be around those people, and I think that's what I enjoy the most about competing yeah, what I understand from you is you're driven by your own performance.
Speaker 2:But I don't really have any goals in a way that I want to. I don't want a proof that I can be better than someone else, if that makes sense, if that makes sense like my. My biggest goal is in the sport is more to push the sport itself, to bring it yeah, to like push my own performance and to bring the sport to a, to a place where it's more seen and where the athletes can live off what they do and where we have, like a bigger community, more space to practice what we're doing, and, yeah, I think in a way that's that's much more worth putting the energy into it.
Speaker 1:I think then to to hunt a certain title in my perspective yeah, I like that, and what you're talking about really is, as you say, amplifying the sport, taking the sport to that next level. So for you, you definitely and I know, as we discussed this, it's something that you now see as a role for yourself as a world champion is how can you continue to help the sport to grow? Now, in doing that, there's a lot that you do from an advertising perspective and from a voice perspective. Can you talk to me a bit? How did you see a way to support growing the brand of the sport through advertising?
Speaker 2:Well, in a way, I always thought that advertising, or like commercials, it's something that people are forced to watch. Often you don't really choose to watch an ad. It's just kind of thrown in your face, and a lot of times I'm very upset by the fact that we get things thrown in our face that are absolutely dumb in a way, or maybe not even just dumb, but that they just reproduce the stereotypes that we already have and they're not really working against it that much. So I think that thought comes from yeah, pretty much like. When I studied my master in gender, culture and social change. I studied a lot about like gender inequalities and and also about like media representation of underrepresented gender, and I found that especially advertising can be a really good tool to break that up in a way that it like sticks in people's minds, because I think when we watch an, an ad, it's just like such a subtle thing that we just like take in what we see without really processing it. But we see images of certain people doing certain things and it just it shapes what we think as well, like if we see a lot of women doing extreme things, it's such a normal thing for us that we're not surprised by that or we're not even questioning if that's something a woman could be doing.
Speaker 2:And when I was younger, like as a kid, I was definitely questioning if that's something that a woman could be doing too, because I mostly like I used to watch a lot of these Red Bull TV documentaries and all that when I was like seven, eight years old, and it was mostly just men and all those surf movies, skate movies, snowboard movies, also Innsbruck, it's like very known for snowboarding and all that and it was like such a male dominated field in action sports that I always questioned like if that's just nothing really for us, or yeah, well, that's really interesting, because there you're talking as much about your masters in gender equality and culture and you're talking about, I guess, from a female perspective, how women, women athletes, are portrayed in the public, and it's very different to men, so they still have that the sexualization of female athletes yeah, why is that?
Speaker 2:and I think, like in ads, this tends to be shown even more extreme sometimes that, like if I look at surfing, for example, the women are still quite sexualized in the surfing industry. And also, if you look a little bit behind, like the way that how the female athletes are making money compared to the male athletes, it's quite upsetting sometimes that we need to be models and athletes at the same time, where otherwise it's quite normal to just be an athlete and not having to justify that you don't want to be like going on a photo shoot where you're not actually doing the sport listen.
Speaker 1:Coming back to you and and your voice, I know that your masters saw the work that you're studying at the moment. As you do that course, what do you hope, or how do you hope, to be able to change the way the sport, and the women in particular, are portrayed?
Speaker 2:well, to be honest, at the moment I actually paused this master study.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's almost finished, I'm pretty much only missing the thesis. But I stopped for a while because I felt like it might have more impact to actually go out and try to do it myself than to write about it for an academic audience. Because what always annoyed me a little bit like especially studying about social inequalities and all that was that if I write something very good about trying to change that, it's still going to stay in an academic field which is not accessible to most of the people academic field which is not accessible to most of the people. And I found that if I try to bring this knowledge to people that they don't have the possibilities to even get to a university or understand this kind of complicated language you need to be using in a thesis language you need to be using in a thesis. Yeah, like, if I manage to reach people in a different way, I think it can have more impact and that's why I paused it to kind of find out if it can yeah, what's happening?
Speaker 1:you want to bring your real life experience into your master's, which I think is wonderful. I also like the way you describe it's good to do the study, it's good to do the writing, but why not go out there and be the change? Why not go out and try and make that change yourself? And right now you have a platform and you're able to grow that platform to make that change.
Speaker 2:And tell me, woman, I do find it even harder to get that support because a lot of times you don't really get taken that seriously, or at least along the way it happened to me quite a lot that I had to prove in a lot of different ways that I mean it.
Speaker 1:So why do you think that is Anna? What do you think the difference is between female athletes in your sport and male athletes in your sport? Why is it harder for you?
Speaker 2:I think, because if we look at the general level of male athletes I'm not gonna lie, it's higher, and for people that they are just watching videos, it makes more sense to be supporting someone who is already at a higher level than a woman who is at a lower level but trying to push it. I think, and I think that what I don know, what is not very seen in this sport, is that there are some differences, like especially in the history. I think if we look back the amount of time that men have been doing this, it's much longer than women that have been doing this. So we kind of just started.
Speaker 2:This generation didn't have many role models to learn from or much support, and I think that in a sport like that, that is that intense. Definitely the physical strength it also makes a difference, and we all know that men just have naturally more muscles than women do, which doesn't mean that we cannot be as strong. But I think that from my experience, like riding a lot with male riders too and training with men I know that I need to put even more effort to reach the same strength yeah, and so how do you see that changing, certainly in your career?
Speaker 1:how do you see that shift changing? How would support be different for you in order to demonstrate that progress is being made?
Speaker 2:I think like one thing that would be a good start is to give equal price money to women and men in races, because even in the world cup it's still usually like that that women don't make any prize money, which makes it very hard to be competing, because you spend a lot of money on the traveling, on the preparation, on registration fees, on everything, and then even if you win, you don't even make it back. And I know that the men, they don't make a fortune either, but at least they have the possibility to win money, which often. It's argued that we have an open category where, technically, all gender are allowed to enter. But I think it's still not equally fair. If I am racing with a man who is twice as heavy is going to accelerate much faster, and I think these are just like little details that they are forgotten about because the sport is also not big enough to even think about, like, for example, weight categories or things like that.
Speaker 1:But I think the most simple thing to start with would be to, just like in most other sports, make a clear category for men and women that get equal price money yeah, and so I'm curious for you as an athlete emerging and as an athlete in an emerging sport, when you think about your future and how you would like to continue to amplify the sport, what actions are you taking?
Speaker 2:well, I think I want to put as much energy as possible into helping the next generation to achieve all that, because I think realistically, of course I'm always gonna keep doing this sport, but I think there's a certain time or age that you probably don't push it as much anymore. I cannot really see myself being 40 years old and trying to go even faster than I did when I was 30. So I think, like I'm already giving a lot of workshops and like I love working with kids and young people to sharing my passion and I'm getting more into coaching as well, which I think like I have a good feeling, guiding kids or like adolescents through times that they are doubting themselves, and I like to help them with those doubts, especially with girls. I think I have like a good connection in that because I can really see those struggles that they are going through. I think a lot of girls tend to be quite shy as well and they don't really want to push themselves into the center of attention as much. And, yeah, I think like what I can give to the next generation is to try and support them like in all these doubts and difficult times that they are going through.
Speaker 2:And the second thing I think it's media that it always stays. If you now create a short film, it's going to be there for a long time. On the internet things usually just stay there. Another thing that I think it can have like a very long lasting effect to put effort into good quality media so the next generation has something to watch and learn from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really like it, what you're talking about there. Two strong aspects One, supporting young athletes, perhaps especially women, to get over the doubts, to come out of the shadow and to take the limelight, because that limelight is needed. It's a necessity to help grow the sport, to bring publicity, to bring revenue or income and investment into the sport. And that second element that you speak of there again really powerfully is creating content. Creating content that, yeah, people want to watch but inspired by and inspires more athletes to participate. And, like you say, you're taking taking those actions. You're doing that yourself, you know. I think those are two really strong aspects and it's wonderful that you are leading by example yeah, and I think actually not even just to inspire other athletes.
Speaker 2:For me, it's also a goal to inspire pretty much everyone, because I think it can be seen in a metaphoric way as well doing something very risky like that it forces you to always get out of your comfort zone and like do things that are really scary.
Speaker 2:And the way that I've experienced it, how my life changed when I started to do that on a daily basis, to like push myself to do something scary all the time, even though I hate being scared, like everyone hates being scared. So I think that it's a good tool to inspire people that they shouldn't like shy away from it just because they don't enjoy that feeling. Because I think it's something that it just tends to happen to everyone. Like it happens to all of us that we want to be comfortable, and the older we get maybe with, the more we try to avoid uncomfortable situations. And I think with what I do, I, I would like to inspire people to question that and to try a little bit more frequently to not be that comfortable and see what happens. Mostly it's something good that happens normally it is.
Speaker 1:That's what we got to push for, right? Hey, listen, anna, I've got to say thank you very much for coming on and sharing a bit of your story and a bit of your perspective with me today. There's going to be lots of people listening who are going to want to follow your story, so what's the best way for them to reach out or find you to interact?
Speaker 2:I think the best way would be through instagram, probably on my page. Anna pixner, it's like just my normal name. I always like reply to private messages as well of anyone who wants to get in touch. So, yeah, I invite everyone who has any questions or who just wants to have a chat to send me a message well, I certainly encourage people to do that, to follow your channel, because the videos to me are quite scary.
Speaker 1:You talk about not wanting to go too fast when you're maybe 40 or in your 40s and I'm definitely there with you thinking, yeah, I'm happy to watch and let that inspire others, but it is quite amazing. So I do say thanks very much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Wonderful story thank you very much for having me thank you for listening to the second win podcast.
Speaker 1:We hope you enjoyed hearing insights from today's athlete on transitioning out of competitive careers. If you're looking for career clarity for your next step, make sure you check out secondwinio for more information or to book a consultation with me. I'd like to thank claire from betty book design, nancy from savvy podcast solutions, and cerise from copying content by Lola, for their help in putting this podcast together. That's all from me. Take it easy until next time.
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