Ghost of finishes past: Jacobellis settles for 4th
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Lindsey Jacobellis flew off the final jump, landed cleanly and charged ahead. The finish line was in sight. So was the podium.
Suddenly, France’s Chloe Trespeuch, to her right and slightly ahead of her, twisted awkwardly in the air, wobbled, then fell when her snowboard hit the ground.
Jacobellis nimbly veered left and swerved around Trespeuch, avoiding her fate of the previous three Olympics.
She didn’t crash. But in a cruel twist of fate that only snowboard cross seems capable of delivering, it probably cost her a medal — finishing fourth by three-hundreds of a second and perpetuating her tortured run of Olympic failures.
“Fourth place is fourth place,” Jacobellis said. “I could be upset about it, but where is that going to get me?”
Jacobellis, you might recall, was leading the 2006 final by a staggering three seconds when she thought it would be fun to try a showboat method grab on the penultimate jump. She crashed, and a Swiss rider zoomed past her for the gold.
Four years later in Vancouver, she swerved to avoid another rider and crashed through a gate. In 2014, she led the semifinal by a wide margin when she crashed on a lumpy section near the bottom and finished last.
Here, she had no crashes. But avoiding one kept her off the podium.
“I finished the best I could,” said Jacobellis, 32. “If we ran the race tomorrow, it could be a whole different story. It’s the winner of this day. It doesn’t define me as an athlete. I’ve been doing this sport for 20 years, and that’s a lot longer than some of these girls have been alive.”
She has won five world championships, 10 X Games and 29 World Cup races.
Plus only one Winter Games medal, and one that history remembers as maybe the greatest blunder in Olympic history.
The question of legacy is complicated for everybody except Jacobellis.
“I just view the Olympics as another (event),” she said. “I think it’s because most of the time people jump in and they see the sport once every four years, so, of course, that’s how they would define me.
“But it’s not how you should be defined because there are plenty of other athletes who have never acquired that Olympic gold but still keep coming back.
“Because what are they truly? They’re Olympic contenders, they’re Olympic athletes. They’re role models and someone who wants to give back to the sport.”