Steven Petrov
The Paw Print
The US snow boarder won the Slope style beating her two main competitors, Enni Rukajarvi from Finland and Jenny Jones, from Great Britain. Jamie finished with a score of 95,25 points, which was 5 points more than Rukajarvi. This added one more Gold medal for the US National team in Sochi. This is Anderson’s first Olympic Gold medal, because before these winter Olympic games, the 23-year-old girl from California had won 4 gold medals in the Winter X-games since 2007, 2 Silver and 2 Bronze ones, but never an Olympic title. The successful female US snow boarder stated that she prefers to compete more in the commercial tournaments within the USA, like the X-games and that her only previous attempt for conquering the international scene was in the 2012 World Championship in Oslo, Norway. Anderson finished 2nd competing in the same discipline, the Slope style.
The two women that were considered favorites before the competition besides Anderson were the Australian Torah Bright and the Austrian Anna Gasser. They both decided to play “risky” and tried one of the most difficult snowboard tricks with a 900 degrees triple rotation. Their risk didn’t pay off the way they expected and their failure to land the proper way crashed their hopes for winning the 1st place. The Australian Bright finished 7th and Gasser was also left outside of the top 5 female snow boarders in the Slope style, finishing 10th.
The way the young Anderson did her last run expressed her exceptional talent as well as the many years of practice and relatively extensive experience in the Slope Style for her young age, just 23. The winner’s main comment after the run was mostly directed towards the fact that she tried to concentrate on being calm and staying relaxed which is never an easy task to do, especially in the biggest winter sports forum in the world. There were numerous speculations before the event regarding the height of some of these jumps and the dangerous nature of the track, which definitely influenced each one of the snow boarders. However, Jamie Anderson managed to deliver her best performance and helped her country to win another major discipline in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
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