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The Winter Olympics was hit with yet more disruption in the early hours of Monday morning as the women’s super giant slalom was forced to be postponed due to high winds.
The race will now be held at 9.30am on Thursday – just before the men’s downhill event, which was also moved after 50mph gusts made it impossible for the gondolas taking the skiers up the mountain to be safely operated.
Meanwhile the Australian snowboarder, Tess Coady, has blamed the wind for a training crash on Sunday which caused tore her ACL ligament in her knee – and left Australian officials questioning whether the practice session should have been cancelled before her crash.
The 17-year-old Coady, who is a junior world champion in both slopestyle and big air, wrote on Instagram after the accident: “Well Olympics came to a screeching holt [sic] today for me. Got picked up in the wind on the bottom jump in practice and my ACL was not a big fan!”
Australia’s chef de mission Ian Chesterman said that snowboarding’s governing body FIS (Federation Internationale de Ski) should examine whether training should have been postponsed.
“I don’t think anyone can say for sure that’s [high winds] what caused this accident but I think it certainly needs to be reviewed,” he said. “I think the international federation need to at some point review whether or not training should have taken place. They obviously cancelled the event.”
An FIS spokeswoman did not respond directly to AAP’s enquiry about safety during women’s training. “The training runs were held directly following the successfully completed men’s competition,” she said. “As the wind strengthened, FIS officials made the decision that it would not be possible to proceed with the qualification round.”
Last week Britain’s slopestyle rider Katie Omerod was forced to go home after breaking her wrist and then her heel in training.
Cox misses out on medal in moguls
World champion Britt Cox finished fifth in the moguls final. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
Australia fell short of its first medal in Pyeongchang after Jakara Anthony was fourth and Britt Cox fifth in the women’s moguls. Cox, the world champion and one of Australia’s best medal prospects, was the second qualifier for the six-woman medal decider but was scored 75.08, 0.27 points behind Anthony.
Gold was taken by France’s Perrine Laffont, scoring 78.65 as snow fell in -12 degree temperatures in Pyeongchang on Sunday, with Justine Dufour-Lapointe of Canada second and Kazakhstan’s Yulia Galysheva winning bronze.
Both Australians looked comfortable as they safely negotiated the elimination rounds, with Cox’s best run in the second of three finals when she scored 78.28. Her third Olympics could be considered a disappointment after she recorded the most dominant individual season in history by an Australian winter sports athlete, in 2016-17.
Her form was questionable leading to the Games despite two World Cup wins from six events and progressing straight into the PyeongChang finals with a top-10 finish in qualifying. Her coach Steve Desovich pulled her out of a World Cup event in Canada to concentrate on strength and conditioning, which he thought was down.
Cox raised her arms after finishing her final run of the Games, possibly more in hope than triumph, but will leave her third straight Olympic campaign empty handed. “My goal coming in today and coming into this whole week was to go for it ... and I truly believe that I did that tonight,” she told the Seven Network.
“I went for it and pushed it a little too hard in the super final there and was scrappy and the girls that were on the podium and Jakara’s performance, they are very well deserving of their results. I went big and I skied fast and it didn’t pay off for me in the super final, but I achieved my goal of going for it and for that I’m proud of my performance.”
The 19-year-old Anthony, much less experienced than her star compatriot, was superb in her first Olympics. She was through repechage as the third strongest competitor and was placed fourth and fifth through the first two finals.
“It’s a great result and I’m so happy,” she told Seven. “A bit bittersweet just missing out on the podium, but I’m still stoked, it’s my best result yet.”
(GUARDIAN)
