From Gaffe to Gold: Lindsey Jacobellis' Olympic Redemption
In the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, Lindsey Jacobellis missed out on the gold in the last second of the women’s snowboard cross final. Her story came full circle 16 years later.
Hey everybody! Hope you had a wonderful weekend, and if you’re just joining us after hearing about us from the House of Fútbol then welcome, we’re so happy to have you. We’ve got a wonderful new edition of The Producer’s Perspective from In the Moment with David Greene in store for you today. This week, David sat down with snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis, who was long known for one of the biggest gaffes in Olympic history—and only recently found redemption. With that, I’ll let Sarah take it away!
See you all on Friday.
-Joe
There she was, flying through the air at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy; “America's Sweetheart” of snowboarding, Lindsey Jacobellis, found herself needing to land just two more jumps to make history and fulfill her much-discussed potential. Then, thud.
As she had been gaining air, Jacobellis grabbed the heel side of her snowboard— known as “a method grab.” But the move caused her to lose her balance, crash, and hit the snow. Before she could get back on her feet, another boarder sped past her, the gold medal slipping out of her grasp.
As soon as she eventually crossed the finish line, journalists shoved cameras and microphones into 20-year-old Jacobellis’ face. Would you care to comment on today’s disastrous result? Why did you decide to showboat at the end? How does it feel throwing away a gold medal?
“I was immediately getting bombarded with media, and they were already giving me all this shame and disappointment,” Jacobellis told us on In the Moment with David Greene. “They wanted the reason. They wanted to understand why I was showboating.”
That label, a “showboater,” followed her for the next 16 years. But the media’s questions were missing something—not just nuance, but also a deeper understanding of Jacobellis and her sport. “You don't understand,” she told us. ”Yeah, maybe I looked like a showboater, but to me, I was just having fun, and it was just something that happened.”
“It was just bad timing, and it was just bad luck,” she told us.
Jacobellis would attend the next three Olympic Games and fell short of the podium every time. Every four years, she would make Team USA, and every four years, the whole routine would start anew: the interviewers and their condescending questions, the pressure, the shame. Everyone wanted to know, “Can Lindsey Jacobellis get redemption after one of the most boneheaded mistakes in sports history?” But, as Lindsey told us, it wasn’t that question that kept her up at night. It was simpler than that. She just wanted to compete.
So came Beijing 2022.
A full 16 years had passed since Jacobellis’ crash in Torino, and at 36-years old, it could have been Jacobellis’ final Olympics. She’d won ten X-Games gold medals and six world titles. She was, by nearly any measure, among the greatest snowboarders in history. But she still lacked that gold medal. In 2022, Jacobellis sought to change history by tweaking one aspect of her Olympic routine: she opted out of any media coverage before the games. The microphones and those pesky questions? She literally refused to think of them. “They had taken those moments away from me so many times, and I wasn't allowing them to do that to me, no matter what my result was,” she told us.
The day of the women’s snowboard cross final, Jacobellis flew through the air. This time, she finally stuck the landing. She’d finally won gold.
It was a triumphant moment, almost out of a movie, but what was the first thing Jacobellis thought? “I had to just get away from the cameras, because I knew they wanted to be right in my face,” she told us. “This isn't about them.”
When we first sat down with Jacobellis to record our podcast, she was hesitant to talk about 2006. “It's really challenging to think of something 16 years ago when so much of that moment had hurt me,” she said. As she told her story, it was easy to see why. It became apparent that our team wasn’t all too different than all those other microphones that had been jammed into her face for the last 16 years. As fans and journalists, we hold athletes to an impossibly high standard, expecting them to be superhuman, and if they fall short, we hold them to the fire.
Our show is about telling an athlete’s story through their most iconic moments, both the highs and the lows. Our conversation with Olympian Lindsey Jacobellis put in perspective for our team what an important and delicate job we have when asking athletes to walk us through their histories. It’s easy to see each moment as a plot point, each athlete as a character. Week after week, I’m reminded that it’s so much deeper than that.
“A lot of times athletes are held to a different standard and not allowed to make mistakes.” she told us, “I think maybe the verbiage or the direction could be like, ‘what an amazing show at 2022’ I would love to work back throughout the years and see what things knocked you down and how you were able to ultimately bring yourself up to that moment.”
I’d assumed that 2022 was Jacobellis’ final Olympics, that she’d go out on top. She finally captured the gold, she must be done, right? But that didn’t seem the case when she spoke to us. She was an ocean away, in the mountains, training for what might just be another Olympic run in 2026.
It just goes to show once again: the person holding the microphone up to her doesn’t know the first thing about Lindsey Jacobellis. Or any athlete for that matter.
Listen to our full conversation with Lindsey on In the Moment with David Greene on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Subscribe so you can listen to other elite athletes relive their moments every Tuesday.
And tell us on Twitter @religionofsport: What do you think of Lindsey’s story?
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