Sharpe riding high into halfpipe season as Olympic champ
Cassie Sharpe was namedropped in a tweet by movie star Ryan Reynolds, saw a little girl dressed up as her for Halloween and even got her face on a pair of socks owned by the prime minister.
These things can happen when you win Olympic gold.
Sharpe won the halfpipe skiing competition in South Korea, nailing jump after jump and thrilling her native Canada. She gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the special socks during a meet and greet at Parliament Hill with other Olympic medalists in May. The idea came after she saw socks adorned with Trudeau’s face at a tourist shop in Vancouver and bought them to wear to the meeting.
“I told one of my friends about it and she was like, ‘You should get socks with your face on them and give them to him.’ So yeah, I gave the prime minister socks with my face on them,” Sharpe said with a laugh in a phone interview with The Canadian Press. “He said people always give him stuff with his face on them so I was like: ‘you know what? Funny you should say that,’ and I pulled up my pant leg and showed him my socks with his face on them.”
The visit to the capital was just one of the highlights for Sharpe in a summer that also saw her take some much-needed time for herself after years of near non-stop training for her Olympic debut. She went to Mexico, Disney World and Japan over a three-month break. Now that she’s back on snow in the Colorado mountains, Sharpe is ready to defend her World Cup points title at her season-opening event at Copper Mountain.
Sharpe finished first in qualifying runs Wednesday for the weekend’s competition with 93.75 points. She called the Copper Mountain halfpipe her “nemesis” — three years ago, she took a tumble on the course while doing one of her easier tricks and has had trouble turning off the negative feelings.
“I think coming into last year I was only thinking about that (fall) and I wasn’t aggressive, I wasn’t enjoying skiing it, I had so much on the back of my mind,” said Sharpe, who’s spent the last few weeks training in Austria. “I think this year coming into it I’ve tried to only have positivity about it and not dwell on something that happened three seasons ago. We’ll see how it goes but I’m definitely trying to emote more positive vibes toward this pipe.”