This war of attrition ends with silver lining
PYEONGCHANG • Before the ladies’ snowboard slopestyle final had even begun on Monday, high winds had blown it all over the place. The weather at Phoenix Snow Park forced the cancellation of qualifying runs on Sunday, and then with the gusts still howling a day later, the start was delayed. The conclusion seemed obvious in a sport in which the competitors often weigh less than 100 pounds and wear enough baggy clothing to do a fine impression of a sail: they wouldn’t actually go through with this, would they?
They would. And then the finals began, and the first rider down the course, Sarka Pancochova of the Czech Republic, promptly took big air off a jump and landed more or less on her head.
It was chaos. Rider after rider was buffeted by strong gusts, some sending them soaring high in the air, where they would flap their arms in the universal signal for I Am Totally Out of Control, and others pushing the riders down so they would crash into the ground with an aerial trick half completed. It was the rare time a snowboard event felt like a war of attrition.
And with the crashes piling up like the riders were demonstrating a demolition derby, and other riders floating through the air like Mary Poppins in a helmet and goggles, i t was Canada’s Laurie Blouin, who had been stretchered off the course just three days earlier after a fall during a training run, who pulled off a clean second ride for a silver, the sixth for Canada at Pyeongchang 2018 and the fourth in the past two days on the Phoenix mountain. American Jamie Anderson defended her gold medal in the same event at Sochi with a clean first run, and Finland’s Enni Rukajarvi took bronze with a smooth second run.
“I’m on a cloud,” said Blouin, 21, after the silvermedal performance. She caught one of those big gusts on her first run, landing way down the jump and losing her balance on landing, so she scaled back her second run after seeing the carnage on the hill ahead of her.
Blouin, from the mountain towns north of Quebec City, was sporting a nasty bruise under her left eye and a cut in the same place, the result of her goggles smashing into her face when she took the spill during training.
Many riders said the event should not have been held at all. Austria’s Anna Gasser, who completed a soaring double flip on her first run but couldn’t hold the landing because she just kept soaring, said the event was turned into a lottery.
Canada’s Spencer O’Brien, who finished 22 nd, said much the same thing, adding that “90 per cent of the women did not want to ride today.”
“I’m just so, so glad that no one got seriously injured today.”