How an invisible strength shapes a life between snow, music, and Brazil.
A story by Pat Burgener interviewed by Mariana Di Pilla.
TDuring the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, there was a moment when everything seemed to slip out of protocol. It became something else entirely, something you could feel. I remember that sensation vividly. When “my” Brazil entered the San Siro, the atmosphere shifted.
Maybe it was the lightness, the rhythm, or simply that very Brazilian way of occupying space with emotion. At the front, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen walked carrying the flag and, suddenly, opened his white cape to reveal another Brazilian flag hidden inside. A simple gesture, but charged with meaning. A manifesto. In Cortina d’Ampezzo, Nicole Silveira guided a passinho choreography with the natural ease of someone who understands that representing a country can also be a performative act. And Livigno, away from the flags, something else happened. An athlete started doing cartwheels and flips. There was something of capoeira in it, something of dance, something of freedom. “Who is this guy?” I remember thinking. It was Pat Burgener. And understanding who he is turned out to be far more interesting than that first impression.
Pat doesn’t fit into a single definition: Olympic snowboarder, singer touring across Europe, son of a Swiss father and a Lebanese mother who, at 6, moved to Brazil (which holds the largest Lebanese community outside their country), and since June 2025, by choice, a member of the Brazilian delegation. A choice that, interestingly, came before he had ever even set foot in the country. “I had never been to Brazil when I decided to compete for it,” he told me. There’s something instinctive about that, less a rational decision. When he finally went, in August, everything clicked. “I fell in love.”
He lives in constant movement. His base is still Lausanne, at his mother’s house, where he also built a recording studio with his brother. But it’s almost symbolic: he spends only a few weeks there each year. The rest of the time, he’s in transit, between competitions, training sessions, concerts, flights, ideas. “Now I want to live in Brazil too. Every free moment I have, I want to be there,” he said. It’s easy to understand why. When he talks about it, something changes. His voice softens, opens. He speaks about inspiration as if it were something physical.
“It’s a place where you feel good. The people, the energy, the music… everything pulls something out of you,”
Maybe that’s why music has taken such a central role in his life. Pat doesn’t treat it as a backup plan. It’s another identity, or maybe an extension of the same one. He writes, sings, tours. And now he’s working on a new album, to be released in January 2027. Six of the songs will be launched as an EP, including “Vai dar Certo,” the Portuguese version of “Work It Out,” the hit song from the exhibitions he performed at Casa Brasil during the Olympic Games. Interestingly, the decision to change “country” didn’t break his relationship with Switzerland.
On the contrary, he was supported through the transition and even performed at the House of Switzerland during the Games, a detail that says a lot about him: someone who builds bridges, not walls.
“If you love something, you can focus more than anyone else.”
Pat Burgener
But it wasn’t always that easy. As a child, Pat was diagnosed with ADHD. In practice, that meant schools that didn’t understand him, expulsions, bullying, a system that saw limitation where there was simply an energy without direction. “It was very hard,” he said. The turning point came through his mother, and through sport. Instead of trying to suppress that energy, she chose to channel it. No medication, movement instead. Today, he calls it a superpower. “If you love something, you can focus more than anyone else,” he added. Listening to his routine, it’s hard to disagree. He describes days where he trains, catches a flight, performs on stage, comes back for just a few hours, then flies again, sometimes across continents. No pause, no off switch. “Not everyone can live like that. But I learned how to use it.”
Injuries also shaped him. One of them kept him off the snow for months and brought him closer to music. Another, more recent, happened just days before the Games. He woke up in the hospital with no memory. He didn’t know his own name. “I remember looking into my phone, seeing ‘February 1st’ and thinking ‘this is very bad’”, he said. And still, he came back. “When I landed my first trick again… I almost cried.”
Maybe that’s what’s most striking about him: not the performance, but the way he moves through setbacks with a kind of grounded belief that everything can be transformed into something else. His decision to compete for Brazil carries that same spirit. It’s not just about a flag, it’s about connection.
“This project is about bringing people together,” he says. “My mother always taught me that. And Brazil has that, it welcomes you, no matter where you come from,” he concluded.
In the end, I go back to that image in Livigno: the ice, the structure, the protocol, and in the middle of it, a body moving as if it belonged somewhere else, maybe on a beach surfing, or in a city skating, two sports that he also practices, maybe in a capoeira circle that he wants to learn, maybe on a stage, which is part of his life with the same intensity as mountains covered in snow.
Even before I knew his name, I had understood something: he wasn’t there just to parade. He was there to live.
Credits. @patburgener @maridipilla
