The 2006 Winter Games in Torino was one of Team USA’s best ever, with nine gold medals. It would have been ten except for an embarrassingly-dumb idea. Twenty-year-old Lindsey Jacobellis held an enormous 50-yard lead in the snowboard-cross final. Nearing the finish in this new Olympic event, she grabbed her snowboard in mid-air to celebrate. Oops. She lost her balance and fell, watching her Swiss opponent zoom past for the gold medal. She said, “In the weeks and months and years following the Torino games, it felt … like the fall was all anyone wanted to talk to me about…Worse, I myself couldn’t stop thinking about it…”
Losing the biggest race of her life by showing off was a deep humiliation. And you’re probably mad at me for punching down on a young woman who just made a mistake. Would you and I want our worst moment seen by a global TV audience of 180 million?
Well, Lindsey Jacobellis did not let one moment define her. In her book, Unforgiving: Lessons From the Fall, she says, “I kept telling myself my story would not end with me on my butt on the side of a mountain in Italy.” She hopped right back on her snowboard. So what if she didn’t make the final in 2010 or 2014. In 2018 she just missed the medal stand in fourth place. Considering her many injuries and surgeries, it was a great career for the four-time Olympian.
Or should I say five. In 2022 in Beijing, the 36-year old Jacobellis put it all together, winning not just her signature event but also the mixed-snowboard cross with Nick Baumgartner. The most accomplished snowboarder in history says, “…sometimes all these things happen in just the right way, at just the right time, and you end up where you were meant to be all along…”
Lindsey Jacobellis is now in her 20th year on the U.S. National Snowboard Team.
I’m Jeff Gentry
Best reference:
Jacobellis, L. (2023). Unforgiving: Lessons From the Fall. New York: Harper Collins.
Dumb Ideas that Changed the World copyright 2024 by Jeff Gentry. All rights reserved.