FINALS: American Hanna Teter (left) won the gold medal in halfpipe Monday, with fellow teammate Gretchen Bleiler earning the silver. FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
I just had to blow that bit out in here, cuz I know from one of my students in Montana that the Flying Tomato guy (Shaun White) is totally amazing, but 'scuse me cuz I'm really just enjoying what these women can do. Totally fun to watch.
And I just can't figure out how Kelly Clark could just catch that much air. Sorry she didn't win, but what an amazing run.
Woo woo!
Link: Salt Lake Tribune - Torino 2006.
U.S. finishes 1-2 in women's halfpipe
By Kurt Kragthorpe
The Salt Lake TribuneBARDONECCHIA, Italy - This will be the last time the U.S. Olympic team is mildly disappointed with a 1-2 finish in the 2006 Games - if there's even another one like it at all. Women's snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler earned gold and silver medals Monday in the halfpipe competition of aerial tricks and turns - matching Sunday's achievement of American men Shaun White and Danny Kass. [...]
BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Gretchen Bleiler of
United States competes in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3
of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in
Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Hannah Teter of the United States celebrates winning the gold medal in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
Link: US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe | csmonitor.com.
US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe
Both the men's and women's teams finish 1-2, as the sport becomes one of America's most certain medal hauls.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BARDONECCHIA, ITALY– At the top of her final run down the halfpipe, her gold medal waiting in the most august competition in all of sport - the Olympics - Hannah Teter danced.
Maybe it was to the music in her headphones. Perhaps it was to the song that thumped over the loudspeakers below and spilled though this dramatic cleft in the Italian Alps like an auditory avalanche. More than likely, though, it was to that same outrageous inner soundtrack that, an hour later, told her it was completely normal to lean back and clunk her boots onto the table during the most important press conference of her life.
[...]
Doncha just love fiesty women at the top of their games? Now somebody puh-leaze tell me why they want to drop SOFTBALL from the Summer Olympics?!
Maybe they need to clunk their boots on the table too.
Monday introduced the world to snowboarding's Odd Couple. There was Gretchen Bleiler, who would win the vote for snowboarding prom queen in a landslide. At the podium, the microphone cupped regally in her right hand, she said winning an Olympic medal has always been a dream. Did the US want a medal sweep? Of course, she answered, but "everybody at the Olympics works so hard."
It is not rehearsed or forced, but familiar. These are the answers Olympians are supposed to give, and she happens to be wired that way.
Then there is Teter, who says that winning the gold medal will change her life. Now she can get a boat - to wakeboard.
She won the gold, she says, by the fortuitous combination of Vermont maple syrup, brotherly love, and yoga. "I lit the candles at night and zoned in," she told a press corps apparently not quite sure if the real Olympic champion was bound and gagged in a closet somewhere.
In truth, the two women champions might not be so different. At the top of her final run - the one that brought her silver - Bleiler paused for a moment to dial in the right song on her iPod. It was no concerto. It was Green Day's buzzsaw "Holiday."
And 30 minutes before their chance at international superstardom, Bleiler and Teter took the chairlift to the top of the hill, hopped under some out-of-bounds ropes, and sought out that greatest of snowboarding treasures: untracked powder.
But this is the Olympics. Weren't they afraid of getting injured? Bleiler corrected: "This is snowboarding."
[...]
[grin] I did some skiing a few months ago, which did my soul good after so many years in the South. One of the funnest lift conversations I had was with this short, fiesty little point guard from just over the Idaho state line who was out snowboarding every weekend even tho her high school coach had forbidden anyone on the team from skiing/snowboarding lest they risk an injury. Brought back some memories. I couldn't snowboard or do any of those things if my life depended on it, but I did my share of sneaking off to Mt Alyeska in Alaska even tho our coaches said "no skiing." Not to mention the trouble we used to get into, sneaking off on our own on basketball trips to pull all manner of stunts in the ice and snow.
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