She admitted to a “very strong love-hate relationship” with them. They expected to continue their long-distance sessions leading to Thursday, the day of the women’s snowboard cross competition.īack in Encinitas, in another time and place, Jacobellis allowed herself to daydream about the Olympics. But Jacobellis and Shull met in California for a couple of days just before Jacobellis left for South Korea. We’ve been there a lot of times, and it hasn’t gone how we wanted for Lindsey, so why not work hard like this and see where we can get?”įoley said Shull was not “a miracle cure” and nixed the idea of her attending the Olympics, preferring that Jacobellis keep a relatively normal competition routine. “The more she deals with it, in some ways, that’s hard work - you’re not allowing yourself to ignore all the feelings you have, and that’s got to be difficult,” Foley said. Gidget barked, as if for punctuation, or maybe an amen.įoley admitted that Shull’s advice to Jacobellis can make him uneasy. “It was just something that happened,” she said, conclusively. It was just me being a teenager and trying to express myself and having fun snowboarding and being lost in the moment.” “Now it’s a little bit easier to forgive myself because now you understand, maybe, why you did something when you didn’t know the rhyme or reason for it. “I had always been so disciplined, and then you get to that moment where you have a choice, and you almost don’t want to do something that someone is forcing you to do,” she said. One of the dogs, a terrier mix named Gidget, stirred at her feet. “And what 19-year-old” - she was 20 - “doesn’t flirt with a little rebellion when they’re growing up as an individual?” “Breaking it down, it was almost this rebellious act,” she said. It was a distinct echo of what Jacobellis said at the coffee shop that warm day not long ago. You do something that’s different than what everyone is telling you and expecting you to do.” ‘Everyone expects me to be this perfect little golden girl who wins this gold medal,’ and what do we all do as teenagers? For normal people, you change your major in college, or you date the wrong girl. “I was like, wait a minute - you were doing what teenagers do,” Shull said. “It would be nice if she could feel better about it.” “She’s had a bad experience with the Olympics, and in a lot of ways she dreads the Olympics now,” Foley said. Their pairing was the idea of Peter Foley, the longtime United States snowboard cross head coach. The biggest difference this time, besides the experience and wisdom that come with four more years, is that Jacobellis has Shull. Certainly, her reward for remaining atop her sport as the 2018 Winter Games approached was to be asked them all again. She knew the questions were coming because she faced them in 2010, when she fell short again, and in 2014, when it happened a third time. What she was trying to overcome was something ghostlier, something harder to catch and release, which is the nagging feeling that when huge numbers of people think of Lindsey Jacobellis, they see a blooper, not a champion. She has been trying to overcome it since - not for herself, really, because she has moved on, quite spectacularly, if people would just pay attention more often than every four years. It’s just mine was on a world stage that people have a hard time forgetting, or they just think that’s the only thing that’s happened or that it defined me as an athlete.” “I’m sure we can go into everyone’s past 12 years ago and pick out something that they coulda, shoulda, woulda done. “Wouldn’t it just be nice if the media didn’t harangue me for something that happened 12 years ago?” she said. Her body was nowhere near the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. A starfish pendant dangled from her neck. She had arrived at the coffee shop from home on a skateboard. The Olympics were months away, and Lindsey Jacobellis, the world’s most dominant athlete in the short history of snowboard cross, wore shorts and a tank top and sipped from a water bottle on a warm day near the beach. 9, 2022: Lindsey Jacobellis won a gold medal in snowboard cross at the Beijing Olympics, finally overcoming her famous Olympic blunder.ĮNCINITAS, Calif.
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