Eileen Gu Is Golden Again at the Beijing Olympics After Win in the Freeski Halfpipe

The "Genocide Olympics" end tonight. Thank God! 

And now Eileen Gu/Gu Ailing's being hailed --- after wining three medals --- as the most successful athlete at the Winter Games. 

I didn't see it, but #EileenGuTraitor might as well have been trending on Twitter.

At WSJ, "She will leave Beijing as the first athlete—man or woman—to win three freestyle skiing medals in a single Olympics":

ZHANGJIAKOU, China—Eileen Gu snapped up another gold medal for Team China at the freestyle skiing halfpipe event on Friday, capping off the 18-year-old’s first Olympics with three medals (two golds and a silver) and cementing herself as the belle of the Games in the host country.

She will leave Beijing as the first athlete—man or woman—to win three freestyle skiing medals in a single Olympics. The big air event, in which Gu won a surprise gold, debuted at these Games. Gu earned a silver medal in the slopestyle event earlier this week.

Gu’s performance was so dominant that her final trip down the halfpipe was a de facto victory run, as her 95.00-point second run was the highest in the field by nearly five points. Defending gold medalist Cassie Sharp of Canada attempted a third run with the highest degree of difficulty of any competitor in the field, but fell short, earning 90.75 points—placing her in silver medal position. Rachael Karker, also of Canada, took bronze with a 87.75-point run.

Of all the medals Gu won in Beijing, her gold on Friday was the most expected. Across five competitions during the 2021-22 season, Gu was undefeated in the event. She made her victory on Friday all but a foregone conclusion with a solid first run that scored 93.25 and vaulted her to the top of the standings. When it came time to climb the podium, she did so wearing an Anta-branded panda hat, a nod to the Beijing Olympics’ pudgy panda mascot Bing Dwen Dwen.

“I have an Olympics panda hat. This is the coolest thing ever,” Gu said, pointing to the Bing Dwen Dwen mascot sewn on the left side of her hat. “Bing Dwen Dwen is very hard to get now so I want to wear it and show off,” she said in Mandarin. The skiing supernova spent nearly an hour walking through the mixed zone to take questions from broadcast and print media. Looking back at her two-week Olympic run fraught with both plaudits and controversies, Gu said: “These few weeks have been emotionally the highest I have ever been and the lowest I have ever been.”

“At the end of the day, I feel very proud, and feel very grateful for the people who have supported me. And for the people who don’t support me, I’ve actually genuinely made peace with it. I’ve dismissed it,” she said.

“My motto is now if they don’t think I’m doing good in the world, then they can go do better,” she added.

Though the score from her first run was high enough to win the competition, Gu improved upon her margin on the second run. She laid down a more difficult final trick involving twists on two different axes and put up 95.25 points. It was the third-highest score she has posted this season, having put up 97.50 points at a World Cup event in California in January.

“She’s competing against herself now,” said the announcer at the Genting Snow Park, as Gu readied for her second run. Starting last in a field of 12 women, her score from the first run topped the field even after the other 11 women had completed two trips down the pipe.

After Sharp failed to top Gu’s score during her third run, despite landing a combination of tricks that no other woman in the field attempted, Gu just needed to wait for two more skiers to throw down. Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru, bronze medalist in the women’s slopestyle competition earlier in the week, scored 85 points; Karker fell.

With a gold medal assured, Gu appeared visibly emotional ahead of her third and final run. She slid down the halfpipe with a few effortless tricks, appearing to have fun by posing with her poles between spread legs after catching big air and whizzing to the bottom to a euphoric home crowd.

The Unbearable Pressure of Winning the Olympics (VIDEO)

It's not just the Olympics, of course. But as these games come only once every four years, the pressure to excel and take home medals is astronomical. Most of those competing are kids. I mean, Lindsey Jacobellis, now 36, probably would've retired years ago if she hadn't blown her near-victory run in 2006, 16 years ago, when she was just 19-years-old. (She finally won her gold medal. It's a good thing. Another wipe out in Beijing would have left a permanent scar on her psychiatric frame for the rest of her life.)

And now we have this poor woman Mikaela Shiffrin who, in Beijing, when the pressure was on, just couldn't cut it this one time --- and she'd been dominating her sport for years and has been called one of the world's greatest skiers of all time.

But she's utterly broken, emotionally drained and psychologically mauled, questioning her very life at this point. 

She can barely talk at the video here, her voice starts cracking with sobs, and all the idiot NBC interviewer can ask is, "What are you feeling?" What the fuck  d'you think she's feeling?!!. She said she's questioning the last 15 fucking of her life. My god, no wonder people were up in arms at NBC's merciless coverage of her wallowing in pain --- for a full 20 minutes --- at the side of the course, simply trying to comprehend it all. 

Oh, the agony of defeat. 

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Olympic athletes deal with expectations, which leads to crushing pressure":

The girl who failed… could also fly. pic.twitter.com/EZJVY03DPc

— Mikaela Shiffrin (@MikaelaShiffrin) February 11, 2022

BEIJING — The world’s most famous skier had kicked off her skis and dropped her poles. Sitting alone in the snow, she buried her head in her hands. Other racers zipped past as the women’s slalom event at the Beijing Olympics continued. But Mikaela Shiffrin, who had skidded out of control and missed a gate near the top of the course, did not move. She remained off to the side for 20 minutes.

“There’s a lot of disappointment over the last week,” she said. “There’s a lot of emotions.”

In what will be an enduring if wrenching moment from these Games, her anguish over failing to finish, much less medal, in the second consecutive event in a little over 48 hours highlighted the unrelenting pressure athletes face at a global competition that comes around once every four years.

For some, the Games have become a suffocating crucible that drains much of the joy from the sport they love.

Even before arriving in Beijing, the 26-year-old Shiffrin acknowledged the Olympics are often “very uncomfortable the entire time” because athletes “literally feel the expectations from the whole world around you.”

At the figure skating venue, an hour or so to the southeast, California-born Beverly Zhu — competing for China — endured similar heartbreak after falling twice during the women’s team competition. Jamie Anderson, the two-time slopestyle gold medalist, posted a raw message on Instagram after finishing an unexpected ninth.

“At the end of the day I just straight up couldn’t handle the pressure,” she wrote, “had an emotional breakdown the night before finals and my mental health and clarity just hasn’t been on par.”

Even Chloe Kim, who became the first woman to win consecutive halfpipe golds, acknowledged her mental health struggles, telling reporters: “It’s unfair to be expected to be perfect.”

Watching Olympians land a double cork 1620 jump, rocket down the side of a mountain at 90 mph or navigate 16 curves headfirst on a skeleton sled can obscure the reality that they can have ordinary struggles despite their extraordinary ability.

“Pressure can be an asset to people at times, bringing out their best,” said Edward Hirt, a professor of brain sciences and psychology at Indiana University. “Those moments are the ones that we think separate the greats from the rest of the pack. But we also know that those pressures can be debilitating and make you choke. I suspect the pressure mounts as people have been successful in the past.”

The Olympics are a unique stage in that athletes can feel the additional burden of representing their country while receiving more attention, if not scrutiny, than at any other time in their careers. They are hyped relentlessly in this made-for-television spectacle, and sometimes castigated when they do not perform as predicted.

These challenges are heightened in a time of pandemic, when athletes are kept in a bubble, separated from the support of family or friends. They must take daily coronavirus tests amid the lingering worry that a positive result — even a false positive — can knock them out of competition.

“Uncertainty creates a lot of pressure,” said Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who is president of Barnard College and author of the book “Choke,” which explores performing under pressure. “We, as normal people do the ‘what ifs,’ Olympians do that, too.”

Lindsey Jacobellis made a late mistake that cost her a gold medal during the snowboardcross race at the 2006 Torino Games that haunted her for years. She won the event Wednesday at age 36 to become the oldest U.S. woman to medal at the Winter Olympics. “Some days, I really don’t like it,” Jacobellis said of the pressure...

 

Mark McMorris Nails Men's Slopestyle at X-Games 2015 Aspen

Just a brilliant run.

Utterly spectacular, for the win.

Extreme Sports Boost USA at #Sochi

Must admit I was getting a kick out of the slopestyle.

At USA Today, "Extreme sports mark changing of U.S. Olympic guard":

SOCHI - For the U.S. team, the Sochi Games signified an end of an era. Goodbye, ice queens. Hello, flippie hippies. See you later, pucks and sticks. Nice to meet you, slopes and rails.

As 17 days of competition came to a close Sunday, this much was clear: The face of the Winter Olympics no longer wears skates. Twelve of the USA's 28 medals came from freestyle skiing and snowboarding, including six of nine gold.

The U.S. Olympic team had never won a medal on every day one was awarded in the Winter Games, and through 14 days in Sochi, the Americans were poised to do that. But the men's hockey team failed to show up in Saturday's bronze medal game, losing to Finland 5-0.

If only the kids in baggy pants with a language all their own had competed in the Games' final days, perhaps the USA could have gone out with more of a bang. Instead, Russia ended this cold war with a flourish — sweeping the podium in the men's 50-kilometer cross-country ski race Sunday and winning gold in four-man bobsled to secure the top spot with 33 overall medals and 13 golds.

For decades, figure skating was the marquee event of the Games. In Sochi, the U.S. men and women figure skaters had their worst collective finish since 1936. Speedskating has been the USA's most successful winter sport. But the short-track team left with one medal and the long-track team exited empty-handed, complaining about their suits.

In contrast, the Americans dominated the action sports events — slopestyle skiing and snowboarding and halfpipe skiing — that made their debut. When the next Winter Games is held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018, Americans are again expected to be strong in the extreme sports. If more events are added to the program — perhaps big air and a team snowboard cross event — the U.S. medal haul likely will grow as well.

"When you look at the impact that adding the sports has had on the Winter Games, it's made the Games more popular from a broadcast standpoint and for the people who are here," U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun said.

Keep reading.

American Jamie Anderson Wins Gold in Women's Snowboard Slopestyle

At LAT, "Jamie Anderson completes gold-medal sweep for U.S. in slopestyle":

SOCHI, Russia — She is a new-age, yoga-loving, mantra-chanting snowboarder who came to the Olympics with a "medicine bundle" in her backpack and an 80-something "spirit grandma" originally from Bavaria along for the ride.

Jamie Anderson came to Russia armed with support and will leave with a precious object to put alongside her mantra beads and clear quartz power stone.

An Olympic gold medal.

Anderson completed a weekend sweep for the United States in the new slopestyle event, winning the women's competition Sunday with an all-out performance in the second run, scoring 95.25, a run marked by clean landings. Enni Rukajarvi from Finland took the silver (92.50) and Jenny Jones of Britain the bronze (87.25), the first Olympic medal for her country on snow.

Jones, at 33 the oldest competitor in the final, was once a maid at a ski chalet. Wimbledon champion Andy Murray even joked, via Twitter, after her second run: "Jenny Jones! Is it wrong to hope everyone left falls?"

With Anderson's victory coming a day after Sage Kotsenburg took gold on the men's side, clearly the United States has claimed ownership of the slopestyle podium.

It could not have been a better script for U.S. snowboarding.

"Am I dreaming? Are you people real?" said Bill Enos, the U.S. slopestyle coach.

He touched the arm of a reporter in the mixed zone, saying: "Yes, oh, everyone here is real."

Keep reading.

Previous Sage Kotsenburg coverage here.

Empty Seats Plague #Sochi Olympics

Check out the picture for the men's slopestyle final. The bleachers are half-full, wtf? That was a cool event. Something else must be going on.

At WSJ, "2014 Sochi Olympics: So Far, Empty Seats Abound: It's Early, But Attendance Suggests Modest Ticket Demand":

SOCHI, Russia—Inhospitable hotels were the big headache of the 2014 Sochi Olympics preshow. After the first day of full competition, it looks like empty seats could become the problem child of the Games themselves.

A few events played to virtual sellout crowds and enthusiastic spectators: notably biathlon, the ski-and-shoot Russian favorite, and team figure skating, in which the home squad held a commanding lead.

But other venues in both the Olympic Park and the so-called "mountain cluster" high above Sochi were plagued by sometimes large swaths of empty seats. And there were a lot of echoes in the empty corners of the arenas for events such as women's hockey and speedskating. Even one of the Games' hippest events, the action-sports event known as slopestyle snowboarding, appeared to have hundreds of empty seats, even though organizers declared it a sellout in the 6,250-seat Rosa Khutor Exreme Park.

The women's hockey crowd of 4,136 for the U.S.-Finland game on Saturday was roughly 60% capacity, and 4,386 watched Canada beat Switzerland. Shayba Arena, the smaller of Sochi's two hockey venues, has a capacity of 7,000.

Some of the lackluster attendance has come during preliminary competitions, which many fans, sponsors and even members of national sporting federations prefer to skip. On the opening day of the 2012 London Olympics, televised images of empty seats at popular events such as gymnastics led thousands of ravenous British sports fans—frustrated for more than a year in their quest for tickets—to complain bitterly to London's Olympic organizers. Those officials later reclaimed some tickets that were going unused by sporting federations and sponsors and sold them to the public.

Sochi organizers said this week that about 80% of their ticket inventory had been sold by the end of January. The organizers wouldn't say how many total tickets they have on offer. But plenty are available.

Based on visits to all the major venues and dozens of interviews on Saturday, the problem in Sochi seems to be more a function of soft demand. The long-track speedskating venue, Adler Arena, offered one of Saturday's marquee events: the men's 5,000-meter race. Yet even at its peak, the crowd never seemed to fill more than three-quarters of the 8,000 seats. Organizers didn't release an attendance figure. In the past, speedskating has been one of the Games' toughest tickets because the venues tend to be small.

At the moguls venue in the mountains on Saturday night, officials put the crowd at about 3,000—well short of the listed capacity of 4,500. Russian fans who are attending are both enthusiastic and opportunistic.

Vartan Oksuzyan, an engineer at a primatology institute in nearby Adler, was at figure skating Saturday night with tickets he purchased in November. He was accompanied by his 18-year-old daughter, Susana, who had her cheeks painted with a Russian flag on the left and a white figure skate on the right. "We're cheering for everyone," he said—the Canadians because a cousin who lives there asked them to, and the Americans at the request of a former teacher of his who now lives in Minneapolis.

Well, maybe the terrorists are keeping people away.

More here.

Sage Kotsenburg Stuck 'Holy Crail' in Olympic Gold Medal Victory

Obviously, I can't get enough of this guy. He's on top of the world.

More at CSM, "Sage Kotsenburg gold medal run: What's a 'Holy Crail'?":

In a triumph of creativity over gymnastics, American Sage Kotsenburg took the gold medal in a new Winter Olympics event: slopestyle snowboarding.

Kotsenburg was, for many, an underdog.

How did he do it?

Kotsenburg brought home the gold, in part, by using one of his newly patented tricks, something he dubs the "Holy Crail."

The Holy Crail is a two-handed grab done during three or four mid-air spins. Kotsenburg reaches behind his back and pulls on his board, while the other hand grabs the nose of the snowboard. The Denver Post's Jason Blevins writes that Kotsenburg unveiled the "Holy Crail" two weeks ago at Aspen's X Games.

Holy Crail is also the name of a sponsored TransWorld Snowboarding video series that features Sage Kotsenburg's journey to the Olympics. The first video aired in December 2013.  Coincidence?

Kotsenburg was a surprise gold medal winner, especially to medal favorites Canadians Max Parrot and Mark McMorris. Until now, snowboarding judges have tended to give the highest scores to those who performed the most difficult tricks. Parrot, for example, is a master of the triple cork and won the X-Games Big Air and Slopestyle contests with triples. (A cork or corkscrew spin is when the axis of the spin allows for the snowboarder to be oriented sideways or upside-down in the air, typically without becoming completely inverted.)

But the Sochi judges apparently chose creativity and style over gymnastic prowess. Kotsenberg, who didn't perform any triple corks, unexpectedly threw in a 1620 (4.5 rotations) Japan Air (the front hand grabs the toe edge just behind the front foot. The board is then pulled behind the rider) in his last run, and took home the gold.

TransWorld Snowboarding offers a trick by trick look at Katsenburg's gold medal run.

More.

Sage Kotsenburg Olympic Spirit!

I didn't think to check Twitter earlier, doh.

This guy's so cool.

This is #OlympicSpirit: pic.twitter.com/HGBzLGqcql

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 9, 2014

And see Bill Plaschke's column, "American's slopestyle gold is totally random."

Dude! American Sage Kotsenburg Wins Sochi Slopestyle Gold

That's so rad!

At NYT, "American Snowboarder Wins First Gold of Games":

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — The snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg is not someone to hold big ambitions or make grand plans. Before winning a qualifying event last month that helped send him to the Winter Olympics in slopestyle, he had not won a snowboarding competition since he was 11.

“A megadrought,” he called it.

And when he stood at the top of the course at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday, he was not sure which tricks he would attempt. The one that mattered was one he had never attempted.

“I just kind of make things up,” he explained.

It was just another way that Kotsenburg, 20, is playfully different than most of his competitors, who have spent all winter perfecting runs that they imagined for months. And now Kotsenburg, from Park City, Utah, stands apart from the rest for the most unexpected of reasons. He has a gold medal, the first of these Games and the first in the debut of snowboard slopestyle in the Olympics.

His victory was not just an underdog tale. It sparked discussions, both among aggrieved competitors and in the wide world of snowboarding, about how such competitions should be judged.

Several athletes landed triple corks, a gyroscopic series of twists and flips, considered the must-do trick to elevate above the field. The favorite, Mark McMorris of Canada, landed two in his run. They were the types of runs that most predicted would win the event, but McMorris settled for a bronze medal. Staale Sandbech of Norway won silver.

Kotsenburg, a throwback in both style and vocabulary — rarely does a sentence go by without a “rad,” a “stoked” or a “sick,” and sometimes there is more than one — performed no such feats of conformity.

Slopestyle, long considered the purer, mellower cousin of the more -famous halfpipe, features a mix of rails to slide down and three large jumps to launch upward. Athletes are judged by the “overall impression” they make to the six judges, looking for an undefined combination of revolutions and style.

The vagueness is intended to spur creativity. And Kotsenburg, more than anyone, toted a unique style, combining old-school spins with newly invented contortions and grabs, sometimes with two hands.

Among his tricks was one performed while sliding down a steep rail near the top of the course, leaning back on two hands. Most call it a full layback. Kotsenburg calls it a stony surfer. A jump featured a two-handed grab nicknamed Holy Crail.

But the gold-winning stunt came at the end, on the last of three large jumps. Kotsenburg performed a 1620 Japan, four-and-a-half revolutions while grabbing the board in front of his front foot and arching his back like someone playing Twister on a flying saucer.

No one else did it. It is rarely seen. But Kotsenburg decided to try it, he said, about three minutes before his run.

“I had never, ever tried that trick before in my life,” he said.

I love this guy, heh.

Still more at the link.

And at London's Daily Mail, "'Wow I just won the Olympics': American Sage Kotsenburg wins first Sochi gold medal in Men's Slopestyle."

Shaun White Drops Out of Sochi's 'Sketchy' Slopestyle Event

The New York Times reports, "Shaun White Pulls Out of New Event to Focus on Halfpipe."

And at this morning's Los Angeles Times, "Olympics 2014: Slopestyle event dares, but athletes hesitate":

SOCHI, Russia — In the parlance of the sport, it had to be gnarly.

Slopestyle, the newest Olympic event, was always going to be a flashy addition to the Games — an acrobatic, free-form assault on a snowy obstacle course of rails and jumps. Elements of danger wouldn't just be evident. They would be a selling point, a path that would lead "slope" from X Games curiosity to legitimacy at the highest levels of international sport.
But did the 2014 Winter Olympic Games go too far?

On Wednesday, Shaun White, the most famous snowboarder in the world and one of the Games' seminal faces, abruptly withdrew from slopestyle, a day before competition would begin for the first time at the Olympic level.

White's Olympics are not over; he is still scheduled to compete in another event, the halfpipe. That's no small matter — White is a halfpipe favorite, and capturing the gold would make him the first American man to win an event at three straight Winter Olympics.

But White's high-profile campaign to capture a medal in two events is done, another troubling development for a Winter Games that cost roughly $51 billion to stage, but has been beset by concerns over safety, cost overruns, human rights and construction woes. Much is at stake for Russia, which is hosting the Olympics for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

"The difficult decision to forgo slopestyle is not one I take lightly as I know how much effort everyone has put into holding the slopestyle event for the first time in Olympic history, a history I had planned on being a part of," White, 27, said in a statement.

White's decision was the culmination of days of mounting evidence that event organizers had overreached and assembled a course that was risky even by the standards of this daring, alternative sport — a course that crossed the line from "gnarly" to "sketchy," as another Finnish competitor put it...

Keep reading.