EXCLUSIVE: A 'weird' injury led to a 'toxic' cycle. Gun snowboarder Tess Coady lifts lid on her escape

When Australian snowboarder Tess Coady crashed in Austria last year and her right shoulder popped out, she asked herself a "toxic" question she'd asked countless times before.

That dislocation, suffered during a competition at Absolut Park, marked the fourth time in four years her right shoulder had come out.

Yet the Olympic bronze medallist had never gone under the knife to repair her shoulder, and as she climbed back onto her feet in the Austrian alps, she was still doubting if she needed to go for surgery.

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"It's such a toxic thing with shoulders and people being like, 'Aw, it's fine, mine popped out 40 times before I got it fixed', and I was hearing that kind of stuff a bunch," Coady tells Wide World of Sports.

"It sucks having to go through the rehab every time you pop it out to get strong and confident and get back on the snow, and the more you do it the more you risk your joint health, so I decided to bite the bullet.

"I think there's a lack of education around that stuff [dislocations]. It is one of those weird injuries where you can keep going. It's not like a broken bone where you can't even put weight on it. Once it's in and settled down it's pretty fine.

"I was definitely talking to a bunch of people who were saying that kind of stuff, and I even put it off [the surgery] just because I was questioning if I needed it."

Coady is talking to WWOS on a video call nine months out from the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, where the St Kilda product will be in action in Livigno next February.

In PyeongChang in 2018, while warming up for what should have been her Olympic debut, the then 17-year-old lost control in gusty winds and ruptured an ACL.

In Beijing four years later, at the age of 21, she produced one of the great Australian moments of China's Olympics when she captured bronze in the slopestyle event.

But since the blissful moment she stood on the podium in China, beaming from ear to ear in her green and gold tracksuit, her budding career has taken a bumpy road.

Some seven months after dislocating her shoulder in Austria in March last year, she was back in the same country when she had a bad fall on an air bag.

On that occasion, her shoulder remained intact, but she suffered a concussion.

She was back on the sidelines again.

The time she spent rehabbing her shoulder was particularly difficult. One moment, she'd be scrolling on social media and seeing other athletes carving up on snow. The next, she'd be trying to do a simple everyday task, but her shoulder wouldn't allow it.

"I was definitely trying to avoid social media because it doesn't help at all," Coady admits.

"It would make me feel pretty crap, for sure. It's easy to compare your situation to other people's, so when you see other people riding and having a good time and working hard and you're in a very different boat, it can be challenging to accept.

"When it [your return to riding] is really far away it's pretty easy to be like, 'Oh my god, I can't even reach overheard to get a glass out of the cupboard. How am I supposed to get back to riding?'."

Coady's rocky career and the resilience she's shown are documented in a short film called Head Peace, presented by her sponsor The North Face. The film was in the running for an award in the 2025 Webby Awards.

"And the thing with social media is you only see the best part of someone's life," she continues.

"Not many people are on there being like, 'These are all of my struggles, this is what's going on and it's really challenging right now'. It's a lot more of posting stuff when your life is good, so it just looks like it's good all the time."

Among the bagful of medals Coady has won are a World Cup gold, an X-Games silver, a world championship bronze and, of course, the bronze she picked up at the Beijing Olympics to secure Australia its first of four medals for those Games.

Her journey to the sport's bright lights began as a nine-year-old when she learned to snowboard on family holidays to Mount Buller, the Victorian resort about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from her home in St Kilda.

Importantly, she's fit and healthy again, and her sights are set on Milano-Cortina.

"Snowboarding is the biggest passion in my life," Coady smiles.

She's painfully aware of that whenever she's injured.

"It's the nature of the sport, which is true, but it doesn't mean it doesn't take its toll on you mentally, and being resilient and coming back from it, and the expectations of people when you come back and the expectations you put on yourself to get back to where you were before, it's all pretty challenging."

Asked what she's learned throughout the ups and downs, she's quick to answer.

"It's just so important to hang in there whenever it's really tough, because if you keep showing up every day and putting in the work to get better, even on the days when it's really hard, you'll be able to improve and get there," Coady says.

"But you have to be really committed to doing that ... If you half-arse it, it's just not going to happen."