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In the tense moments before a high-pressure event, Winter Olympian Matt Graham looks for his daughter’s face.
He pulls his phone from his pocket, lights up the screen and focuses on her image.
It is a reassuring habit the 31-year-old moguls specialist has formed since becoming a father in September 2024 that will help drive him towards Winter Olympics gold next month.
“I found myself doing it just this past season, which I didn’t expect,” he tells this masthead.
Matt Graham with a world championships silver medal in 2023. Credit: Getty Images
“She’s my background on my phone, so during competitions, when the stakes are high and the pressures up, I’d often just like, pull my phone out, just open it up, sort of blow her a kiss and just say, ‘let’s f...ing go’.
“I just found myself doing that naturally. It wasn’t planned. It’s more my way of just getting in the zone and getting amped up for the event.”
Graham has embraced fatherhood. Despite the added complications for an athlete who lives in Sydney and competes on the other side of the globe, it provides him with extra motivation as he prepares for the Olympics in northern Italy, which begin on February 6.
“My day-to-day life as an athlete hasn’t changed a whole lot,” he says.
“But mentally, it’s quite different. I feel like there’s more purpose when I’m away.
“I’m not doing it just for me.”
Matt Graham during moguls qualfying at the 2022 Beijing Games.Credit: Getty
Graham and his partner Jess had daughter Ada in September 2024 and were married 13 months later in October last year.
“It was a big step, obviously,” he says. “Anyone who’s a parent sort of knows that the transition can be quite full on. But yeah, I mean, Jess and I were both ready to become parents.
“We’d obviously spoken about it a lot, leading up to us trying to be parents, and then once it eventually happened, it was about preparing for the hard times when I was going to be away.”
Graham had a patchy season last year.
But he bounced back in sparkling fashion last month, winning a World Cup moguls event in Ruka, Finland. It was a unique double for Australia as Jakara Anthony also won gold.
“My performances in the past season were, it was a bit of a rocky road,” Graham says.
“But the failures, or the times I didn’t succeed on the competition tour, it made it easier to get over because I would just go home and get Jess on FaceTime and, I mean, yeah, my daughter, Ada, she doesn’t care.
“She’s just smiling and yapping away. So it makes that easier to sort of push past and move on from those downtimes.”
Graham hit a low point in December 2021. Coming off an Olympic silver medal in South Korea in 2018, he broke his collarbone in a heavy fall in Sweden just two months out from the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.
Despite an intensive rehabilitation program, he was far from his best. He competed in pain and finished 29th.
Matt Graham during moguls qualifying at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.Credit: Getty
The experience rocked Graham. He admits he was “heartbroken” and considered calling time on his career.
But the qualified civil engineer made some adjustments and rediscovered his love of the sport before he had to overcome more setbacks. His collarbone hadn’t healed properly, and he was sent for further surgery.
“Generally speaking, a broken collarbone is an easy injury to come back from, but unfortunately, mine was a little bit more complicated,” Graham told the NSW Institute of Sport.
“I had some issues with the bone healing. Consequently, I had to undergo four completely separate surgeries, which prolonged the injury over a two-year period.”
After the operations and three sets of plates and screws, Graham then had to rediscover the right mindset.
“Sometimes, you know, you’ll have a big crash, a big stumble, and you’ve got to get back up and right your wrong, and learn from that mistake,” he says.
“I guess I’ve developed a bit of a way to push past those things and just know that I’ll be fine. If I attack a course, and I’m hesitant or conservative, then I’m at more risk than if I more or less just attack it.
“Sometimes a moguls course can be pretty daunting, it can be steep, it can be icy, in some cases it can be a little bit scary. So, I guess you have to have a screw or two loose to take that step and really attack each day in each competition.
“[But] I’d say generally I’m quite conservative in life. The risks we do out in the snow, they’re very calculated.
“I mean, we do a lot of practice from general acrobatic training on the trampoline, gymnastics hall, to trying tricks for the first time on water, to then taking to snow.”
Graham grew up on NSW’s Central Coast and first made his name sailing dinghies, winning four national titles and six state titles in junior class boats.
But having learned to ski at Perisher from the age of three, he opted for a professional career on the winter slopes and quickly excelled. He made his Olympic debut aged 19 at Sochi in 2014.
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“I don’t know how long I’ll ski for, this will likely be my last Olympics,” he says.
“Ada and Jess are going to be there. It’s something I’m really looking forward to … being able to go into that finish area and have my family there. It’s going to be pretty special.
“Unfortunately, Ada won’t be able to remember it really, but I’m sure there will be plenty of photos and videos that she’ll be able to look back on when she’s a bit older.”
Read more of our Winter Olympics coverage
- ICE at the Winter Olympics: Agents to support US security, stirring anger in Italy
- Jakara Anthony doesn’t think this will happen again in her lifetime, and it’s not her Olympic gold
- Like a swimmer with a crocodile in the pool: Peel’s push for Olympic gold
The Winter Olympic Games will be broadcast on the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
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