‘I’m on a cloud’
Days after injury, Laurie Blouin rebounds for slopestyle silver
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. It was snowboard crossed with bull riding: Point the board downhill, and hold on for dear life.
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, it 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. Not one competitor of the 26 in the field managed two runs without some kind of wipeout.
“I’m on a cloud,” said Blouin, 21, after the silver-medal 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.
“At first I was like, yeah, we’re in finals, might as well send it, but then I was like, ‘OK, a lot of girls are falling. I should go safe,’ and that’s what I did.”
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. In her accented English, she said she never doubted that she would be ready to ride.
“I’m really stubborn, is that how you say it? If I want to compete, I’m going to compete,” Blouin said.
But the competition was not without controversy. Many riders said the it 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 said much the same thing, adding that “90 per cent of the women did not want to ride today.”
“I watched the first handful of runs just because I wanted to see how the speed was playing out, and I had to stop watching, honestly,” said O’Brien, who finished 22nd. “It was so painful to see some of the crashes that were happening, to see how short some of the girls were coming up. I’m just so, so glad that no one got seriously injured today.”
“It was really scary with the wind,” said Rukajarvi after her bronze-medal run. “I had a really bad fall on my first run, so I was pretty scared to ride, so I was happy I was in one piece after.” Again: this is from someone who won a medal.
“It’s terrifying,” said Canada’s Brooke Voigt, who finished 21st. “When it’s gusty like this it can hit you mid-air. Picture holding an umbrella in the wind: that’s your snowboard. It kind of just takes you a little bit.”
O’Brien said she was disappointed that the competitors weren’t asked what they thought of the conditions. She had a strong second run going when, approaching the second of three jumps, “I got the gnarliest gust of wind,” she said. O’Brien put on the brakes before even reaching the lip. “I just knew that there was no way I was going to make it anywhere near the landing,” she said.
For Blouin, who joked that it looks like she got into a fistfight, it was tough to watch so many friends and competitors struggle. “It sucks,” she said. “I think it’s unfair, but we always have to deal with conditions.”
A little bit of luck, and a little bit of adjustment, and she was on the podium. With the wind still howling on the mountain, she called her mom, and then her coach, and then her dad. “My dad was crying,” she said. “He never cries. And then I cried.”
A good cry, though.