After waiting 16 years to win a first Olympic gold medal, Lindsey Jacobellis captured her second in four days on Saturday after pairing with Nick Baumgartner to win the inaugural mixed team snowboard cross event.
In a heart-pounding final race, Jacobellis frittered away the 0.04sec head start supplied by her team-mate in the first wave, but made a late move to overtake Italy’s Michela Moioli on the inside of the final right-banked turn and held on over the final jump to win by 0.20sec beneath heavy snowfall at the Genting Snow Park in the mountain village of Zhangjiakou.
Moioli and Omar Visintin settled for the silver medal, while Canada’s Eliot Grondin and Meryeta O’Dine won bronze.
Baumgartner, 40, and Jacobellis, 36, the elder statesmen of the US snowboarding team, become the oldest snowboarders to win any Olympic medal and the oldest Americans to win gold at the Winter Games since 1948, when Frank Tyler piloted the US team to victory in the four-man bobsleigh.
“We’re 80s babies and we were comin’ in hot today,” said Jacobellis, who won Team USA’s first gold of the Beijing Olympics on Wednesday in the women’s snowboard cross final, the same event where she infamously squandered a certain victory with a showboat move near the finish line at the 2006 Olympics, when she was 20.
On Saturday, Jacobellis punctuated what may have been her final Olympic ride with a similar board grab over the final jump.
“I’ve been on this team for 20 years, Nick’s been on this team for 17 years, we are like a family,” Jacobellis said. “It’s the experience in snowboard cross, because it’s so hard to replicate the same scenario, because there’s so many uncontrolled variables. It really helps to have the years behind you, so you can make the best execution and call what you need to do in that moment because you have mere seconds or less to make a decision.”
In snowboard cross, which has been described as Nascar on snow, four snowboarders race simultaneously down an obstacle course with a series of jumps, berms, turns and drops. In the mixed team event, the men race first and the women follow with staggered start times based on their teammate’s finishing times.
While the mixed team event was making its Olympic debut on Saturday, it has been a feature on the snowboard circuit for nearly a decade, including at numerous World Cups since 2012.
The degree of difficulty for Saturday’s final was compounded by low visibility and -11C (12.2F) air temperatures in the mountains roughly 120km northwest of Beijing. Among those troubled by the conditions was Australia’s Belle Brockhoff, who was stretchered off the course after clipping another rider during her quarter-final race.
The 20-year-old from East Melbourne was taken to a local hospital in a neck collar but was returned to the Olympic athletes’ village after CT and MRI scans revealed no serious damage, Australian officials said.
Jacobellis said that she was able to use the fresh snow that impacted the conditions on the 1,310m course to her advantage.
“I tried to remember my old X Games days and jump as hard as I can on every jump to try to make the landing and use the draft when possible,” said Jacobellis, who becomes the second snowboarder to win two golds at a single Olympics after Russia’s Vic Wild won the the parallel slalom and parallel giant slalom champion in 2014. “I definitely am very comfortable riding very closely to other riders and then trying to execute off that speed that I gain from them.”
The oldest snowboarder to ever represent the United States at the Olympics, Baumgartner gave an emotional televised interview after a 10th-place finish in Thursday’s men’s snowboard cross, where a late wide turn in the semi-finals torpedoed his medal chances. On Saturday, the four-time Olympian could finally celebrate his first career medal.
“It’s unbelievable, it’s days like two days ago that make today feels so good,” Baumgartner said. “These tears are so much better than the ones from the other day. I can’t tell you how much pressure is off you when you know you’ve got someone like Lindsey in the gate after you.”
He added: “It’s tough to watch the young kids take over and try to push you out of the sport so that hunger is strong. And as long as you’re willing to put in the work, and you still have the dedication for the hard work, you can really push yourself to a new level.”
The United States have now racked up five gold medals since Wednesday when Jacobellis ended the Americans’ longest-ever wait for their first gold at a Winter Games: three in snowboarding, one in figure skating and one in freestyle skiing.
