Good Losers at the Olympics -- Part I

Did you see this?

BARDONECCHIA, Italy, Feb. 17 — About 100 yards from the finish line, Lindsey Jacobellis hung in the air. She had only one jump remaining. Her closest competitor was about 50 yards behind. Lucky Lindsey, as she used to be called, got in the way of her own victory ride. Like a basketball player going for a reverse dunk or a football player high-stepping toward the end zone, Jacobellis stylishly grabbed the back of her board in midair. She coolly angled it to the right. The move is called a Method. It may have to be renamed the Jacobellis.

Bad idea. She falls, and by the time she had gotten up and slid past the finish line, Tanja Frieden of Switzerland had crossed the line and won the gold. The worst finish since Jean Van de Velde at the British Open.

What was she thinking?!?!

Asked to explain why she would choose to perform a needlessly risky aerial maneuver in such a crucial situation, Jacobellis, from Stratton, Vt., said: "I just was trying to grab my board on the jump so I could stabilize myself. You're not trying to create style there. You're trying to create stability." She softened her case somewhat during a teleconference two hours later, acknowledging that she was possibly trying to have some fun and may not have made the best choice. Jacobellis refused to paint herself as a showboat, but it was impossible to argue with the pictures on the big screen.

But do you know what? If Lindsey Jacobellis would have won the gold, who would have been talking about it? Who would have remembered? As it is, she's become a Winter Olympics Immortal.

Here's an editorial that appeared in the New York Times this morning:

You Go, Lindsey

The sports world was buzzing yesterday about Lindsey Jacobellis's Olympic moment. The young American snowboarder seemed to have clinched the gold medal in the snowboardcross when she tried to get fancy on her next-to-last jump, crash-landed and scrambled miserably to her feet as Tanja Frieden of Switzerland blew by her to win the gold. Besides a silver, Ms. Jacobellis won an instantaneous reputation as a showboater who "got what she deserved," in the words of one sports commentator.

As she explained later, the flamboyant spirit of snowboarding had chosen a bad time to express itself. "I was having fun," she said. "Snowboarding is fun. I was ahead. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the crowd. I messed up. Oh, well, it happens."

To the uninitiated, snowboardcross looks like a combination of roller derby and surfing. It's hard to imagine anybody regarding the outcome as a matter of life or death. Perhaps that's why its athletes, like the other snowboarders at the games, seem to be stealing the show with their cheerful good humor. Meanwhile, the potential champions in sports like figure skating grimly go about their business, trying to pretend that it's all for the love of the sport, that the whole world isn't watching, that a king's ransom in endorsements doesn't hang in the balance.

At times, the atmosphere gets downright gloomy. When the American figure skater Johnny Weir missed the bus to the rink, he got upset and skated badly, and finished without a medal. "I didn't feel my aura," he said. "Inside I was black." Meanwhile, the Russian skater Yevgeni Plushenko accepted his gold medal with a stone-faced stare, "looking completely unamused," as The Times's Juliet Macur reported. "I tell the truth, this is my dream, yeah, and I am so happy," Mr. Plushenko said unconvincingly. "Believe me, I am so happy."

Meanwhile, Ms. Jacobellis had an amazing race, built a huge lead, got exuberant and went splat. What did she think these were — Games?