Millie Bongiorno carving a path for the next generation of Alpine Snowboarders

“There’s no greater feeling than the wind rushing by you, and you carving, just laying down a trench in the snow,” says Australian Alpine Snowboarder Millie Bongiorno.

What originally started as an ambition for Bongiorno to beat her brothers down the slopes, has become a goal to match it with the world’s best alpine snowboarders.

The 25-year-old Victorian Institute of Sport rider enjoyed a breakout season this year, achieving her first top 20 result on the World Cup circuit. Despite starting the season with an illness, Bongiorno returned to racing with a career-best 19th at the World Cup event in Bulgaria in January.

“I was really stoked with that, with 19th place,” Bongiorno said. “First time in the top 20 and I’m just hoping to build off that and get more time on the snow, more training, and work my way up to the top 15, top 10 and top 5”

Bongiorno is aiming to raise the profile of alpine snowboarding and inspire younger athletes to give it a go. 

“I was pretty lucky to get my start in alpine snowboarding, I’d always done snowboarding just to fill in school teams, originally for Interschools. 

“My brothers were also all snowboarders so I also kind of wanted to be like them, I wanted to be faster than them, to be better than the boys, so that’s kind of where I started snowboarding.

“But then alpine was just by chance. One of our family friends had an old alpine board, old alpine boots and they said ‘if you like snowboarding you should give this a try’. I tried it, absolutely fell in love with it and it took off from there.

“I’ve had a lot of interest from younger kids coming and asking me ‘what are the pathways, what are the opportunities out there?’. I think it’s a really exciting time, we’ve got some young athletes who are showing a lot of interest, so the passion is there and I think if we can just garner more interest, get more time on snow together, maybe even a Futures Camp, that would be really beneficial for the growth of the sport.”

Buoyed by her personal best World Cup result this year, Bongiorno is encouraging Aussie kids to make tracks for Interschools competitions this season to ignite their snowsports journey.

More than 7000 students from 700 schools compete in Snow Australia’s Interschools events each year. More than 80 of Australia’s Winter Olympic athletes competed in Interschools, including 30 who were part of the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

Bongiorno reflected fondly on her own sporting journey through Interschools.

“It’s such a good team environment and you get the chance to do it with your friends,” Bongiorno says. “I think that’s really important when you’re starting out skiing or snowboarding, that you do it with friends, you enjoy it - you learn to enjoy the sport first before you go into serious competition … it’s as simple as that: enjoy your time with friends, enjoy your time with family being there as well watching.”

While Interschools is the making of many of Australia’s Olympic athletes, Bongiorno, says making friends is by far the best part.

“Interschools is such a fun, relaxed environment, there’s no pressure to do well, you just have fun with your friends,” Bongiorno says.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to represent your school as well and just meet new people from schools you normally wouldn’t mix with, so I think absolutely give it a go.”