The PowHERful Podcast with AJ McCord

She started as a wildcard and now she hasn't lost in the nine years since. Red Bull World Series Cliff Diver Rhiannan Iffland is the undisputed queen in her sport, she's won nine straight titles and is going for her 10th. But in this episode, the Aussie gets vulnerable about fear, how she faces it every time she's on the platform, and the ways she's learned to talk herself through the scariest of...

“Being brave is not an absence of fear, you need fear to be brave.” Kelsey Pfendler is trying to do what no woman her age has done before - row from Monterey, California to Oahu, Hawaii by herself, completely unsupported, rowing a boat utilizing only her own power to get across the 2,400 mile stretch of Pacific Ocean. It sounds crazy, but for Kelsey, who’s been a professional whi...

Women’s surfing is entering a new era, one of equal pay, consequential waves, an excitement for the sport that feels unquenchable. Six women are leading the way and in a groundbreaking Red Bull Media House Film they share their Now Days. Highlighting the surfing of world champions, Olympians and ceiling shatterers, four of the women sit down to share where they see women’s surfing goin...

CURIOSITY | Para-snowboarder Brenna Huckaby describes her journey from Louisiana to professional snowboarding as a bit of a “Jamaican Bobsled” story. After losing her leg to cancer, she was introduced to the mountains through a hospital program designed to help recent amputees rebuild confidence — the idea being that if they could conquer a physical mountain, the metaphorical one...

RESILIENCE | When Oyuna Uranchimeg visited the US in 2002 from Mongolia, she had no idea how her life would change. A car accident left her paralyzed, in a foreign country, with a six-year old son at home who needed her. As she prepares for her 2nd Paralympics representing Team USA in wheelchair curling, Oyuna shares how she showed up for herself, despite days when she wasn’t sure she could....

INTUITION | Natalie Allport appears to be absolutely fearless. A former member of the national snowboarding team in slopestyle, former competitive Crossfiter and current member of the Freeride World Tour where she snowboards off cliffs on raw mountain faces around the world, she takes on everything that comes her way without faltering. However, in this episode, Allport shares how developing a rela...

SELF-BELIEF | Biathlete Deedra Irwin is chasing history in Milan-Cortina, trying to earn Team USA their first ever Olympic medal in Biathlon. With a military background, there was plenty of crossover for Irwin into a sport that involves multiples laps of cross country skiing and shooting. Her fight for a medal comes as she, along with her teammates, also fought to overhaul a culture within the spo...

FIGHT | Annika Malacinski competes in the exact same sport, at the exact same level as her brother but he’s going to the Olympics and she’s not. The Steamboat Springs, Colorado native takes us inside the fight to get women’s nordic combined into the Olympics as the only sport in the entire Games that does not have a women’s division. This episode is for equality and the big...

LEGACY | Four time Olympic speed skater Brittany Bowe will be competing in her final Olympics in Milan Cortina and this episode is a reflection. It’s a reflection of her incredible accomplishments on the ice, World Records and Olympic medals included, but more than that it’s about legacy. It’s about how she’s lived every day in a way that transcends sport. This is for anyon...

PROCESS | Jaelin Kauf has won nearly every accolade possible in her sport of moguls; an Olympic silver, seven-time US Champion, 16 World Cup wins and the reigning World Champion. But this small-town Wyoming athlete is leaning into something entirely different heading into the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics - the process. She explains how a mindset shift set her up to win the silver in Beijing and h...

CONFIDENCE | Kaysha Love exudes the kind of confidence that is so true and solid it’s contagious. The Team USA Bobsled star shares her journey from gymnastics to track to bobsled, detailing how she’s stayed true to herself every step of the way. In this episode you’ll learn how Kaysha and her teammates get their sleds to Europe (spoiler alert it’s RIDICULOUS), what her favo...

SUPERMOM | Canadian free skier Cassie Sharpe has added a new job title to her resume since her last Winter Olympics: mom. She says while it’s her favorite one yet, she’s still Cassie the pro skier too. While juggling both titles can be a bit chaotic when trying to travel the world and compete in the halfpipe, she dives into why she’s embracing being one of the trail blazers among...

PURPOSE | At 20 years old snowboarder Maddy Schaffrick thought she would never pick up a snowboard again. The sport that had been her life, her career as a pro snowboarder out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado had wrecked her, ruined her, and left her wondering what on earth to do with herself as someone who spent very little of her adolescent years in the ‘regular’ world. She became a pl...

CALM | Skeleton racer Mystique Ro has officially locked in her spot for Team USA and is heading to her first Olympics! In this [BEST OF] episode, get to know the daughter who grew up as one of the oldest of 11, how that chaos led her to an individual sport she calls her “kernel of chaos,” and what she’s learned from the trail blazers who came before her about creating a legacy th...

ADAPTABILITY | Sophia Kirkby is making her Olympic debut, along with her sport of women’s doubles luge, in large part thanks to her ability to adapt. She started luge at 7, but switched to doubles in her early 20s. Her father, her biggest cheerleader and the man who got her into the sport, passed away, now she carries his words on her gloves on race days. This episode is for those who’...

FEAR | In this [BEST OF] Episode of The PowHERful Podcast, AJ McCord sits down with Olympic Great British free skier Zoe Atkin. The Stanford student is entering the 2026 Winter Olympics as one of the top contenders to bring home a gold medal in free ski halfpipe. In this episode she gets vulnerable about her relationship with fear and how one psychology class at Stanford changed the way she approa...

OPTIMISM | At first Anna Gibson thought the idea of joining Team USA’s ski mountaineering training camp was a bit ridiculous. She’s a professional trail and track runner, and diverting into ski mountaineering, a sport that will make its Olympic debut in Milan-Cortina, wasn’t in her 2025 plans. But then she asked the question ‘what if?’ and had the courage to look at t...

As women’s sports continue to rise, women’s surfing isn’t just riding the wave — they’re leading it. Lakey Peterson, a veteran of the World Surf League Championship Tour, represents a pivotal generation of female trailblazers. She recalls a time when winning a contest earned her $15,000, while the male winner of the same event took home $100,000. Since then, she&rsquo...

Picking yourself back up after a fall is never easy but it’s something competitive mountain biker Jess Blewitt knows how to do all too well. When you look at her last few years it would be so easy to focus on the injuries, but that is far from what the first ever female entrant to Red Bull Hardline has done. Instead she shares a lesson about the power of presence and managing fear in a world...

Paris 2024 marked another meaningful step forward for equality in Paralympic sport, but the work is far from over. As winter Paralympians look ahead to their own moment on the world stage in Italy, they’re also bracing for the all-too-familiar media narratives that often reduce their complex journeys to a single moment or medal. In this episode, 2x Paralympian Dani Aravich joins us to unpack...

Hammer thrower Janeé Kassanavoid was poised to make her first Olympic team in 2024 and then, she missed her throws at the Olympic Trials in Eugene. This past weekend, she returned to the scene of one of her greatest disappointments and rewrote her Hayward Field history - making her third World Championship team. Her story is the one of overcoming disappointment, of owning what went wrong an...

As athletes, and often as women, we're frequently told we must fit ourselves into a nice neat box of what society defines our role to be. Luckily, Kristine Anigwe never subscribed to that belief. Now the former WNBA player is building her fashion empire, one she started when she was still an active player. KA Originals has been in the spotlight as both she and many stars around the W have rocked h...

She’s a 2x Olympian, 6x World Champ and multiple X Games medalist and yet, the road has been full of struggle and perseverance few knew about for BMX freestyle rider Hannah Roberts. In this episode she shares how she manages the pressure and privilege of being a trail blazer, as well as how learning to deal with things as they come has helped her navigate the ups and downs. It’s a less...

Trailblazer. Badass. “One of the boys.” Vicki Golden has been called all that and more, but to her, it’s simple: she’s a rider. Raised on two wheels and fueled by the grit her late father instilled in her, Vicki has broken barriers in the world of motocross, and she’s still pushing limits today. Her story is one of resilience, determination, and a love for the ride. T...

No. 1 Senior Pro Pickleball Player Lee Whitwell is a trail blazer and community builder who shares her journey through one of the fastest growing sports in the country. And while we talk about where we're going, we remember the importance of never forgetting who blazed the trail we walk.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.