Bardonecchia, Italy – About 100 yards from the finish line, Lindsey Jacobellis hung in the air. She had only one jump remaining. Her closest competitor was about 50 yards behind.
American coaches were being congratulated. Family members were being mobbed. Jacobellis, 20, the face of several Olympic advertising campaigns and the favorite in the first Olympic women’s snowboardcross race, was all but being crowned the fourth American snowboarder to win a gold medal. But if the snowboarders seemed immune to the difficulties that have befallen American athletes like the skier Bode Miller and the figure skater Johnny Weir in these Olympics, that notion came to a crashing end Friday.
Lucky Lindsey, as she used to be nicknamed, got in the way of her own victory ride. Like a basketball player going for a reverse dunk or a football player high-stepping to the end zone, Jacobellis stylishly grabbed the back of her board in midair. She coolly angled it to the right. The move is called a Method. It may have to be renamed The Jacobellis.
At the height of her jump, Jacobellis said she felt a stiff wind in her face and briefly lost her balance. She could barely control her legs, burning from the demands of the 3,000-foot course, and she attributed the blood she tasted in her mouth to exhaustion. She tumbled from the clouds and landed on the heel edge of her board, then fell hard against her backside. Spinning three times on the ground, with her blonde pigtails dragging against the ice, she formed the saddest snow angel in the Alps.
Jacobellis bounced up, just in time to watch Switzerland’s Tanja Frieden fly by and claim her gold medal. The snowboardcross, making its first appearance at the Olympics, provided its first goat.
Although Jacobellis collected the silver medal, her ride will be remembered for her fall. “As a freestyler,” Jacobellis said lightheartedly, “I bow my head in shame.” Asked to explain why she would choose to perform a needlessly risky aerial maneuver in such a crucial situation, Jacobellis, from Stratton, Vt., said: “I just was trying to grab my board on the jump so I could stabilize myself. You’re not trying to create style there. You’re trying to create stability.” She softened her case somewhat during a teleconference two hours later, acknowledging that she was possibly trying to have some fun and may not have made the best choice.
Jacobellis refused to paint herself as a showboat, but it was impossible to argue with the pictures on the big screen. After watching a video replay in the media center, U.S. snowboardcross coach Peter Foley said: “She definitely tweaked it a little harder than she needed to. If she saw it, she’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a little much.”‘ Although snowboardcross does not award style points, participants are still snowboarders, flamboyant and carefree, and they often punctuate victorious runs with fashionable jumps.
Jacobellis, a top snowboardcross racer who is also a decorated halfpipe rider, went for the kind of move that captured gold for American halfpipers Shaun White and Hannah Teter. Her timing, however, could not have been worse.
Jacobellis was set to become the fourth American snowboarder to win a gold medal in an Olympics that has so far not lived up to expectations for the U.S. team.
In her finals heat, two of the other three racers had already crashed. The third one, Frieden, was so far behind that she had lost sight of Jacobellis. “I was just stoked to have silver,” Frieden said.
As Foley watched on television, he said, he was screaming at the monitor: “Keep racing! Keep racing!” When coaches from other countries came up with premature handshakes for his assistant, Jeff Archibald, Archibald shouted, “No!” At the moment of the fall, the Jacobellis family appeared to go silent. Foley grabbed his face in agony. And Frieden, coming around a final turn, recalled yelling, “Whoa!” She quickly flashed back to an X Games race a couple of years ago when she was comfortably in the lead and came out of her crouch before the finish line. Jacobellis, crouching all the way, overcame her at the wire.
But the Olympics are not the X Games, and Jacobellis acknowledged that she was more nervous than usual heading into her last run. In the Visa commercial that stars Jacobellis, her coach tries to calm her nerves by telling her: “You can do this. Don’t look at them, look at me. Picture yourself alone on the mountain. Imagine yourself on the medal stand. No one can touch you.”
Foley, on the other hand, talked strategy atop the hill. He told Jacobellis to grab her board if she did not feel comfortable with any of the jumps. Jacobellis said she was particularly uneasy about the second-to-last jump of the course.
It is curious, then, that Jacobellis would attempt a trick on the very jump that she was so worried about. “Sometimes it’s subconscious, but that was putting on a show,” Seth Wescott, who won the men’s snowboardcross on Thursday, told the Associated Press.
Wescott stood at the bottom of the mountain, wearing his gold medal, as Jacobellis walked away with her head bowed and her shoulders slumped. Jacobellis is Wescott’s teammate. But Frieden is his girlfriend. His loyalties were divided.
Conflict and crashes have come to define the Olympic debut of the snowboardcross. In the final race, Canada’s Dominique Maltais careered through a side net and fellow Canadian Maelle Ricker fell so violently that she had to be taken by helicopter to a trauma center. But Maltais won the bronze and Ricker was released from the hospital Friday night.