Old guard goes for gold in the debut of mixed team snowboard cross.

When mixed team snowboard cross makes its Olympic debut on Saturday, it will do so with two athletes who know their way around the course better than anyone.

Lindsey Jacobellis, 36, who became the oldest woman to win an Olympic medal when she won the women’s snowboard cross this week, is teamed with Nick Baumgartner, 40, the oldest athlete on Team U.S.A. and the oldest American snowboarder in Olympic history. Baumgartner was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the men’s snowboard cross event on Thursday.

Faye Gulini, 29, and Jake Vedder, 23, are on a second team U.S. team competing in the event.

Four snowboarders at a time will race through an obstacle course with a series of jumps, berms and sharp turns. In the team event, one man and one woman per team compete relay style. The man goes first, and when he crosses the finish line, the start gate opens for the woman.

Beijing is Jacobellis’s fifth Olympic appearance. Her win this week was a story of quiet perseverance. A premature celebration cost her a sure victory at the 2006 Olympics; in 2010, she swerved off course in a semifinal heat and missed the final; in 2014, she stumbled and missed the final again; and in 2018, she finished fourth.

Baumgartner, a four-time Olympian, hopes his age-defying Olympic run “inspires people to never give up on their dreams,” he wrote on Instagram before competing in Beijing. “You’re never too old to fight for what you want!” He builds a practice track around his house every year to stay in the game.

A member of the U.S. team since 2005, Baumgartner finished fourth in snowboard cross at Pyeongchang in 2018. And despite his elimination from the Olympic event this week, he has made it to two World Cup podiums in the past three months. He began snowboarding when he was 15, but it wasn’t until college that he found snowboard cross, an event he once described as the perfect mix of his two favorite sports: football and snowboarding.

“I’m 40 years old, I’m running out of chances,” Baumgartner said near tears after his elimination from the quarterfinals on Thursday. “This one stings. This one hurts.”

But, he said, he wasn’t done yet.

“I ain’t stopping on this, I have to do something better to end with,” he said.