It was not Gretchen Bleiler’s best X display Friday night in the superpipe. She over-rotated her 540 on her first run, bailing on what was closer to a 720. Then, during her second run’s frontside 900, Aspen’s most heralded snowboarder cratered into the deck, slamming her head hard before backward somersaulting 22 feet down the wall into the pipe and again whipping her head against the snow.
“I was riding really well in practice and really excited for finals. The first run I think I was a little overexcited,” she said Saturday. “For my second run, I had been landing my frontside 9s every time in practice, and this pipe you can’t leave early and that’s what you tend to want to do because it is so tall. And I left early, and when you do that, you don’t come back to the transition. You land on the deck, as you all saw last night.”
Despite a slight concussion, Bleiler was up at sunrise working on an upcoming Aspen-based “Dinner: Impossible” show for the Food Network.
Jason Blevins, The Denver Post
