I really want to feel sorry for Lindsey Jacobellis this morning. Most of you probably don’t know who she is unless you are watching a lot more of The Winter Olympics than I am.
So here’s a little background: Four years ago when snowboarding was introduced as an Olympic sport, Jacobellis had a chance to become a star—at least in the way most Winter Olympians become stars. She wasn’t going to be Shaun White, who I guess has become some kind of snowboarding icon or Lindsey Vonn, who has yet to win an Olympic medal but is now being treated by the American media as if she’s Peyton Manning with a sprained ankle on the eve of The Super Bowl.
Update: Lindsey stepped in and out of the shower this morning pain free. Her husband, the ever-present Thomas Vonn, reports that if the women’s downhill is delayed until June—as now seems likely—Lindsey should be ready to ski pain free. Unless she’s not. More in about 15 minutes.
Four years ago in Turin, Jacobellis was leading an event called the snowboard cross, which is, essentially, a race down the mountain on snowboards with various gates and jumps along the way. Watching it can be very entertaining and there’s no doubting the remarkable skill of the competitors. She was cruising in the four-woman final when she came to the last jump. Whether out of excitement or ebullience or cockiness, she came out of the jump and did what other boarders (they’re not skiers right?) described as a hot-dog move, leaning forward to grab the front of her board as she came off the jump.
If you’re out for a romp on a mountain and you’re good, there’s nothing wrong with such a move. When you are competing for an Olympic Gold Medal, it probably isn’t such a good idea because it’s not easy to do and, well, the goal at that moment is to get to the finish line, not look cool. If you want to really look cool you stand on a medal stand with gold around your neck and hear your national anthem played. Now THAT’s cool.
Jacobellis fell. By the time she scrambled to her feet the only remaining boarder who hadn’t fallen yet, Tanja Frieden, whooshed by her. Since no one else was following her, Jacobellis got up, stumbled across the finish line and won the silver medal.
Look, an Olympic silver medal is an amazing accomplishment. I’ve had the chance to HOLD Olympic medals won by others and that’s as close as I’ll ever come to an Olympic medal. I would be thrilled right now to win a medal in a Masters swimming meet. But when you are the best in the world at an Olympic sport and all you have to do is not screw around for another five seconds and you opt to screw around and you turn gold into silver, that’s just foolish.
What Jacobellis did was the competitive equivalent of Michael Phelps thinking his lead in the 200 freestyle at the Beijing Olympics was so huge (which it was) that he could flip on his back and backstroke to the wall. Except he miscalculated and someone passed him on the last stroke.
Jacobellis—and a lot of snowboarders—didn’t see it that way. Her reaction was, basically, “whatever, it happens. I was having fun.”
Old people like me weren’t so much horrified as stunned. You train like crazy in a sport where the only event anyone but friends and family care about is the Olympics and decide to “have fun,” a few yards from a gold medal? The flip side were people who said, “hey, the snowboarders and X-games types were brought in to breathe new life into the Games. This is what you get.”
Okay, we’re all different. And, since all Olympic athletes are pros nowadays, Jacobellis would—barring injury—get another shot in four years. Well, her shot came on Tuesday. She didn’t make the final. On what was apparently a slushy and difficult course, she boarded (is that what you say?) off the course during the semifinals, missing a gate. That disqualified her.
Here’s where I have trouble feeling sorry for her—which I want to do, the way I feel for Tod Lodwick, the Nordic skier who JUST missed a medal on Sunday in the Nordic combined, finishing in fourth place in his fifth and almost certainly last Olympics. There’s nothing worse than finishing fourth in the Olympics. It’s much worse than finishing second. You “win,” silver. No one ever says you “win,” fourth. Lodwick’s got one more shot in the relay next Tuesday. I, for one, will be pulling for him and the American team big-time.
Jacobellis has apparently been complaining about the condition of the course all week. She’s apparently not wrong but, last I looked, everyone was boarding on the same course. Then, Tuesday, after her flame-out she walked past reporters in what’s called the “mixed zone,” which is where reporters can lean over a barrier and try to talk to the athletes as they walk by—if the athletes decide to and stop and talk. To this day, working a “mixed zone,” may be the most humiliating thing I’ve done as a reporter. Jacobellis just kept going when reporters tried to get her to stop and talk.
Whatever happened to, “I’m just having fun,” or “it happens?” Maybe it’s a good sign that she was upset about her performance. Maybe she figured out that the Olympics are, in fact, a competition. Or maybe she’s another spoiled athlete who can go stand in line with most of the world’s tennis players.
Either way, it’s too bad. As I said last week, what I like about the Winter Olympics is that most of the athletes aren’t hyper-marketed stars who we learn to dislike almost as soon as we get to know them a little. (Figure skaters, of course, are the exception. We’ll go back to the figure-skating competition in a minute, but first we have another update from Thomas Vonn: Lindsey ate breakfast with no visible discomfort. She’s planning to eat lunch. We aren’t ready to commit to dinner yet. More to come after Bob Costas introduces the next four hours of figure skating).
Lindsey Jacobellis had one chance to win a gold medal and blew it. She got a second chance and was unlucky. The first time around she shrugged it off. This time she was clearly upset.
Maybe that’s progress. Maybe she’ll get another chance in four years. Or maybe she’ll spend the rest of her life staring at that silver medal and saying to herself, “what was I thinking?”
Showing posts with label Lindsey Vonn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lindsey Vonn. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Winter Olympics -– I still buy into the notion of the Games
The Winter Olympics begin tonight with the Opening Ceremonies, which I assume will last about eight hours on NBC.
I hate to sound jaded, but to be honest, once you’ve seen one Opening Ceremony you’ve seen them all. The ONLY thing that matters is the entrance of the athletes. The rest is fluff, time-filler and, frankly, boring. If I think about it, I’ll try to tune in near the end when the Canadian team walks in. Seeing the host country’s athletes walk into the stadium is usually a chill-producing moment.
As it happens, I’m one of those guys who still buys in to the notion of the Olympics—especially the winter games where so few of the athletes are stars in the marketing world. More likely, they’ll have 15 minutes of fame if they medal or produce a remarkable performance. Lindsey Vonn, if she can get down the mountain on her injured shin and win a couple of gold medals will be selling a lot of products in the near future, but she may be the list. There are no figure skating stars (at least going in) who are likely to follow in the footsteps of Peggy Fleming, Janet Lynn (still my all-time heart-throb) Dorothy Hamill, Katerina Witt or even the infamous duo of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.
NBC will certainly try to create stars. It will spend a lot of time focusing on the snowboarders because they’re trying to pull in a younger audience and the U.S. is very good at snowboarding. We’ll see a lot of skiing and a fair bit of speedskating although there aren’t as many U.S. medal contenders—particularly on the women’s side—as in past years. Of course you never know. Someone could come up with the performance of a lifetime.
Most of my favorite Olympic moments—the U.S. hockey team in Lake Placid aside—involve athletes most people have never heard of or might vaguely remember. When Brian Shimer won a bronze medal in bobsledding in his fifth and final Olympics—his first Olympic medal ever—in 2002, I thought that was a very cool story. I had the pleasure of being there in 1984 when Jeff Blatnick, having beaten cancer, won the superheavyweight gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling and wept on the mat when it was over.
I remember a lot of swimming moments because of my background as a never-was swimmer. I remember all of Mark Spitz’s swims in 1972 but my most vivid memory is of his last race: the 100 freestyle. There was a Russian swimmer in the lane next to him (I can’t remember his name anymore) who came out of the pack in the last 10 meters to get the bronze medal. At that point in time he might have been the first Russian man to medal in swimming but in any event, no one had expected him to medal and he did. He was so thrilled that he held up three fingers to Spitz, “going ‘three, three, I finished three,’ while Spitz just kind of looked at him as if to say, ‘yeah so what, I’m Mark Spitz and you’re not.’ I thought the guy being that excited was great.
I remember seeing Bobby Hackett, who I’d known a little from local meets around New York (we were in different age groups so I never actually had the chance to get my butt kicked by him) winning a silver medal that same year and being awed that a kid from Gator Swim Club could do something like that. Like everyone, I remember Michael Phelps in Beijing but my most vivid memory is Jason Lezak’s amazing anchor leg in the 400x100 freestyle relay that allowed Phelps’s quests for the eight gold medals to stay alive. THAT was thrilling.
The Olympics have changed completely since I first began watching them as a kid and even covering them as a young adult. Everyone who takes part now is a pro, the old Avery Brundage myth of “amateurism,” having been put away years ago. That’s good in the sense that you don’t have Soviet athletes who are allegedly factory workers when their fulltime job is clearly playing hockey or figure skating or running track. But there’s also a loss of some innocence there: The Miracle on Ice can never happen again because the hockey tournament is an NHL tournament, the players divided by countries instead of by cities. I remember when Dr. Gary Hall was considered a marvel when he qualified for his third Olympics as a swimmer in 1976 because once you finished college in those days you had to go get a job.
Now, swimming is a job for anyone who is world class, which is why Phelps will swim in his fourth Olympics in London in 2012 and that won’t make him unusual at all. Swimmers are like all other professional athletes now: they keep going until they aren’t good enough to get paid anymore.
All of which is fine. And I will still think it is cool if U.S. bobsledder John Napier, whose Army unit deployed to Afghanistan this month (he may follow them next month) can win a medal. If, as people say, this is the year the Americans can add a second Nordic skiing medal to the silver Bill Koch won in 1976, that will be a good story. I’ll watch a lot of the skiing because it is fun to watch the skiers charge down the mountain on the brink of disaster at any given moment.
One thing I do have trouble with is NBC’s approach to the Olympics. Even in Vancouver, where the Pacific Time zone should make it possible to televise a lot of events live in prime time, a majority of the coverage will be taped. You can bet you won’t see Vonn or Bode Miller skiing much before 11 o’clock Eastern Time most nights and it will be on tape. Great sports moments should be LIVE, you should sit there not knowing who won or who lost or what will happen in the next instant.
Even if you do the, ‘don’t tell me who won,’ thing, most of the time you can figure out from the timing who won and who lost while you’re watching. Plus, in today’s world especially, it is almost impossible to resist the urge to find out who won. So, I’ll watch a lot, but the fact that much of it will be on tape will take some of the enjoyment out of it for me—and for others.
The Olympics are still two weeks I look forward to whenever they take place. I’ve had various ideas for books that would have involved the Olympics but never gone through with any, mostly because the books I’d like to do on Olympic athletes would be decidedly un-commercial. I wouldn’t be caught dead writing about figure skating. Speedskating or bobsledding or luge would be more up my alley.
Cue the syrupy music, it’s time for Bob Costas to tell us how spectacular the Opening Ceremonies are. Of course that’ll be live—the one thing that doesn’t need to be live. I’ll check in on Saturday when the competition begins.
I hate to sound jaded, but to be honest, once you’ve seen one Opening Ceremony you’ve seen them all. The ONLY thing that matters is the entrance of the athletes. The rest is fluff, time-filler and, frankly, boring. If I think about it, I’ll try to tune in near the end when the Canadian team walks in. Seeing the host country’s athletes walk into the stadium is usually a chill-producing moment.
As it happens, I’m one of those guys who still buys in to the notion of the Olympics—especially the winter games where so few of the athletes are stars in the marketing world. More likely, they’ll have 15 minutes of fame if they medal or produce a remarkable performance. Lindsey Vonn, if she can get down the mountain on her injured shin and win a couple of gold medals will be selling a lot of products in the near future, but she may be the list. There are no figure skating stars (at least going in) who are likely to follow in the footsteps of Peggy Fleming, Janet Lynn (still my all-time heart-throb) Dorothy Hamill, Katerina Witt or even the infamous duo of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.
NBC will certainly try to create stars. It will spend a lot of time focusing on the snowboarders because they’re trying to pull in a younger audience and the U.S. is very good at snowboarding. We’ll see a lot of skiing and a fair bit of speedskating although there aren’t as many U.S. medal contenders—particularly on the women’s side—as in past years. Of course you never know. Someone could come up with the performance of a lifetime.
Most of my favorite Olympic moments—the U.S. hockey team in Lake Placid aside—involve athletes most people have never heard of or might vaguely remember. When Brian Shimer won a bronze medal in bobsledding in his fifth and final Olympics—his first Olympic medal ever—in 2002, I thought that was a very cool story. I had the pleasure of being there in 1984 when Jeff Blatnick, having beaten cancer, won the superheavyweight gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling and wept on the mat when it was over.
I remember a lot of swimming moments because of my background as a never-was swimmer. I remember all of Mark Spitz’s swims in 1972 but my most vivid memory is of his last race: the 100 freestyle. There was a Russian swimmer in the lane next to him (I can’t remember his name anymore) who came out of the pack in the last 10 meters to get the bronze medal. At that point in time he might have been the first Russian man to medal in swimming but in any event, no one had expected him to medal and he did. He was so thrilled that he held up three fingers to Spitz, “going ‘three, three, I finished three,’ while Spitz just kind of looked at him as if to say, ‘yeah so what, I’m Mark Spitz and you’re not.’ I thought the guy being that excited was great.
I remember seeing Bobby Hackett, who I’d known a little from local meets around New York (we were in different age groups so I never actually had the chance to get my butt kicked by him) winning a silver medal that same year and being awed that a kid from Gator Swim Club could do something like that. Like everyone, I remember Michael Phelps in Beijing but my most vivid memory is Jason Lezak’s amazing anchor leg in the 400x100 freestyle relay that allowed Phelps’s quests for the eight gold medals to stay alive. THAT was thrilling.
The Olympics have changed completely since I first began watching them as a kid and even covering them as a young adult. Everyone who takes part now is a pro, the old Avery Brundage myth of “amateurism,” having been put away years ago. That’s good in the sense that you don’t have Soviet athletes who are allegedly factory workers when their fulltime job is clearly playing hockey or figure skating or running track. But there’s also a loss of some innocence there: The Miracle on Ice can never happen again because the hockey tournament is an NHL tournament, the players divided by countries instead of by cities. I remember when Dr. Gary Hall was considered a marvel when he qualified for his third Olympics as a swimmer in 1976 because once you finished college in those days you had to go get a job.
Now, swimming is a job for anyone who is world class, which is why Phelps will swim in his fourth Olympics in London in 2012 and that won’t make him unusual at all. Swimmers are like all other professional athletes now: they keep going until they aren’t good enough to get paid anymore.
All of which is fine. And I will still think it is cool if U.S. bobsledder John Napier, whose Army unit deployed to Afghanistan this month (he may follow them next month) can win a medal. If, as people say, this is the year the Americans can add a second Nordic skiing medal to the silver Bill Koch won in 1976, that will be a good story. I’ll watch a lot of the skiing because it is fun to watch the skiers charge down the mountain on the brink of disaster at any given moment.
One thing I do have trouble with is NBC’s approach to the Olympics. Even in Vancouver, where the Pacific Time zone should make it possible to televise a lot of events live in prime time, a majority of the coverage will be taped. You can bet you won’t see Vonn or Bode Miller skiing much before 11 o’clock Eastern Time most nights and it will be on tape. Great sports moments should be LIVE, you should sit there not knowing who won or who lost or what will happen in the next instant.
Even if you do the, ‘don’t tell me who won,’ thing, most of the time you can figure out from the timing who won and who lost while you’re watching. Plus, in today’s world especially, it is almost impossible to resist the urge to find out who won. So, I’ll watch a lot, but the fact that much of it will be on tape will take some of the enjoyment out of it for me—and for others.
The Olympics are still two weeks I look forward to whenever they take place. I’ve had various ideas for books that would have involved the Olympics but never gone through with any, mostly because the books I’d like to do on Olympic athletes would be decidedly un-commercial. I wouldn’t be caught dead writing about figure skating. Speedskating or bobsledding or luge would be more up my alley.
Cue the syrupy music, it’s time for Bob Costas to tell us how spectacular the Opening Ceremonies are. Of course that’ll be live—the one thing that doesn’t need to be live. I’ll check in on Saturday when the competition begins.
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