After winning gold Saturday in snowboarder X, Lindsey Jacobellis is ready to see the footage of last year’s disaster disappear into the archives.
Jacobellis, still best known for her showboating in the 2006 Olympic final that cost her the gold medal, crashed on the last jump in the final last year at the X Games.
Since then, ESPN has been showing the 2007 tumble for weeks to set up these Games.
“It feels really good to come back and win after falling last year,” said Jacobellis, who won boardercross gold here in 2003, 2004 and 2005. “I think all my sponsors are raking in the money because they’ve been showing so many angles of me falling and falling.”
She said winning Saturday was special because the course wasn’t to her liking. She said the course, which was 800 feet longer than last year’s, was “fairly easy. . . . It was too glidey. It’s not the kind of course I usually prefer, so I’m really happy to do well on a course I’m not really comfortable with.”
Wide open.
The Steve Fisher- Shaun White superpipe showdown is off after Fisher failed to advance to tonight’s finals. Fisher, the Breckenridge rider who won superpipe gold last year and in 2005, crashed on both runs.
The top 10 advanced, and White qualified second behind X Games rookie Ryoh Aono of Japan. Aono was first after the opening run and bettered his standing with a 92.33-point run in his second trip.
Unlucky seven.
The seven-feature slopestyle course was hard on the snowboarders Saturday, as rider after rider scrubbed landings.
By the end of the women’s second round of runs, it was obvious that whoever could stay clean could leave with gold. Then Tahoe teenager Jamie Anderson, who took slopestyle gold last year, busted out a flawless 720 off the course’s money booter.
During the men’s slopestyle late in the afternoon, the last six boarders scrubbed their landings coming off the big table feature. Andreas Wiig beat out Shaun White’s broken-board run to win gold.
Switch it up.
Norwegian Torstein Horgmo fought past fan favorite Travis Rice of Jackson, Wyo., then floated through the finals to pick up his first X Games gold medal in snowboard big air competition.
Dropping into the step-up jump switch (opposite of his normal stance), Horgmo landed a couple of off-axis backside 900-degree spins to top Kevin Pearce in the finals. Pearce failed to land 1260-degree spins on two attempts.
But the true gold-medal round may have occurred when Horgmo and Rice squared off in the semifinals of the four-man event.
Rice won over an audience that accounted for half the scoring through text messaging with his inverted “double-rodeo 1080” against Horgmo’s switch-backside 1260. But television analyst and former X Games gold medalist Todd Richards of Breckenridge gave his half of the vote to Horgmo, as did the tie-breaking judge who set up the final duel.
“I was going to try the switch 1260 again (in the finals), but I didn’t have enough speed,” Horgmo said.
David Krause: 303-954-1893 or dkrause@denverpost.com
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
