When stud snowboarder Kevin Pearce wiped out on this season’s hot trick in the halfpipe, leaving him with a severe brain injury, it was an unwelcome reminder of the perils when bodies collide — at high speeds and odd angles — with ice and snow. Almost a half-century ago, the TV anthology “Wide World of Sports” chose a ski jumper’s crash as the embodiment of “the agony of defeat.”
But while Winter Olympic sports have always boasted thrills, spills and chills, what they long lacked was the allure of head-to-head competition. For a long time, only hockey (and, very bad pairs skating) featured the collisions between athletes that television viewers, particularly young ones, seem to find enticing.
In 1992, with hopes of a ratings boost, the International Olympic Committee added short-track speed skating to the Olympic roster. From the start, it was a smash hit. Short-track delighted fans with its roller-derby spirit, as human carnage produced grudges that escalated into national blood feuds. The Olympics quickly doubled the competition from four races to its current eight.
With recklessness in the rink at saturation point, the IOC chose to bring some of that mayhem to the slopes. Snowboarding, particularly the halfpipe with its gravity-defying stunts, had already proved itself a successful X-Games crossover. So for the 2006 Turin Olympics, snowboard cross was added in hopes of melding snowboarding’s appeal with that of short-track.
Snowboard cross is a mad chase in which four boarders battle down the same course — through twists, turns, jumps and, often, each other. And in Turin, the event was a stunning success. After a treacherous 3,100 feet descent, both the men’s and women’s finals produced memorable finishes for Americans — one a spine-tingling triumph, the other a mind-boggling disaster.
The triumph belonged to Seth Wescott, at 29 a veteran of the snowboard wars. Growing up in Maine, Wescott began skiing at age eight, but soon drifted toward snowboarding. Like most of the early rebels on the slopes, Wescott found skiing too regimented, its coaches too controlling.
Snowboarding was less about discipline and technique than about having fun and grabbing air. Even as snowboarding gained traction in the sports universe and its competitions grew in size and intensity, it remained convivial, even fraternal.
Indeed Wescott’s approach to his Olympic training could serve as the snowboarder’s mantra: “Fun and success go hand in hand.” He incorporated other sports — surfing, kayaking, biking, skateboarding — that bolstered his strength and balance while assuring that he wouldn’t be bored. After twice failing to make the Olympic team in halfpipe — the second time, he believed, because of a judging error — Wescott shifted his focus to the cross event, where first man down the hill wins and “your fate doesn’t depend on somebody else’s decision.
In the Olympic final, Wescott seemed fated to be second man down the hill. After a wobbly jump, he found himself trapped behind Slovakia’s Radoslav Zidek, who had won all three of his earlier heats. But coming out of a sharp turn, Wescott spied the narrowest of openings and launched himself. He flew past Zidek’s shoulder and somehow landed right ahead of him. In a charge to the finish — the two were so closely in tandem that Wescott raced in Zidek’s shadow — the American held on for the gold.
The women’s final was not as close, far more bizarre and, in the end, equally dramatic. The four boarders were barely off before two had crashed. One lost control on a jump and had to be carried off on a stretcher; the other clicked boards with Switzerland’s Tanja Frieden and got the worst of it, winding up tangled in a safety fence. Frieden struggled to stay upright and, by the time she regained her balance, wasn’t within shouting distance of America’s blonde bomber, Lindsey Jacobellis.
The 20-year-old Jacobellis was already a familiar face to Americans. Her youthful good looks and derring-do — she had won her event at three consecutive X-Games — had attracted several big-name sponsors. Now she was cruising for Olympic gold, just 100 yards from the finish, when she chose to cap her victory with a classic snowboarder’s flourish. Soaring off a jump, she reached back to grab the heel of her board — a stunt called Method-air — and lost control, spilling over before skittering off course.
As a stunned Jacobellis scrambled to climb back up, Frieden glided past her to claim the gold medal. In the snowboarding universe, where style counts for plenty, there was great sympathy for the showboating American. But in an Olympic world ruled by the hard currency of medals, most believed that Jacobellis … well, Jaco-blew-it.
Mark Starr has been a national sports correspondent for Newsweek since 1982 and has attended 10 Olympics. Look for his columns each Sunday in The Herald leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Games.
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