Canada up and down on slopes
Elation tempered by heartbreak as Dufour-Lapointe wins silver
In the space of about two minutes on Sunday night, Canada’s freestyle skiing squad experienced the full range of Olympic emotion: unbridled joy swinging to crushing heartbreak.
When Australia’s Britteny Cox, skiing in the penultimate spot of the women’s moguls final, was given a fifth-place score, it locked Canada’s Justine Dufour-Lapointe, who had delivered a solid run just moments earlier, into a podium position.
Up in the starting gate at Phoenix Snow Park, there was just one skier left. Andi Naude, the 22-year-old from Penticton, B.C., just needed a run that matched what she had done a half-hour earlier, and she would have an Olympic medal of her own.
Naude soared through a difficult first jump — a full backflip with a twist — but picked up a lot of speed when she landed. She couldn’t quite regain her line and all of a sudden her skis were sideways and she was off the course.
Naude’s blown final run meant Dufour-Lapointe, 23, of Montreal, won the silver medal with a score of 78.56 points. France’s Perrine Laffont edged her for gold by less than a tenth of a point at 78.65, and Yulia Galysheva of Kazakhstan took bronze at 77.40.
Afterward, the teammates were a striking contrast. Dufour-Lapointe was all smiles. Naude was bravely talking about keeping her head held high, but as much as she tried to focus on the positives, she couldn’t quite keep it together. She held back tears until she couldn’t hold them back any longer.
“Up there, I was really just trying to focus on what I love to do, and that’s to ski. And to be at the top, going down last at the Olympic Games, that’s really special.” Here, her voice broke.
Dufour-Lapointe said that the silver was as sweet as the Sochi gold, especially after the struggles this year and with both of her parents present and healthy. Her family is everything to her, she said.
“It’s the only thing that counts, actually, at the end of the day if you don’t have anybody to hug.”