Jacobellis still doesn't have Olympic gold, placing fourth in snowboard cross

BONGPYEONG, South Korea - All around her, right before the finish line, there was chaos. Later, she would say she saw shadows all around her. She saw other riders in her peripheral vision. She saw somebody in a yellow bib tumble just in front of her, feet before the finish line, and Lindsey Jacobellis shifted ever-so-slightly to avoid a collision. Then, in the mayhem, she was past the finish line.

She looked up at the scoreboard.

In one of the Olympics' most helter-skelter sports, Jacobellis had finished behind the bronze medalist by .03 seconds. She'd finished behind the gold medalist by .046.

Trying for a fourth time to win an Olympic gold, Jacobellis finished just shy of the podium in Friday's women's snowboard cross event. For the American, it was another disappointment in a stellar career that nonetheless has been defined by its Olympic setbacks.

Italy's Michela Moioli won gold. Julia Pereira De Sousa Mabileau of France won silver, and Eva Samkova of the Czech Republic took bronze.

Earlier in the day, Jacobellis easily won a six-person quarterfinal heat, guaranteeing her place in the semifinals among the final 12 riders. In that race, Jacobellis and Samkova stayed ahead of the pack, clinching spots in the final.

"You can definitely see what is going on," Jacobellis said of the crowded pack near the finish line. "You see a bunch of shadows all happening, you see movements. I knew it was going to be close."

"I got caught in traffic, and you can only do so much," she said. "If we ran the race tomorrow, it could be a whole different story."

Since snowboard cross's Olympic inception, Jacobellis has been the face of the sport. She is 32. She has won 10 X Games medals. She has won five of the past seven world championship titles.

But such is the way of the Olympics, and the way memory works, that the shorthand story of her career consists entirely of its lowlight. Twelve years ago, in Turin, she was cruising toward a gold medal. She tried to burnish the final seconds of the race with a showy move - a little midair twist, grabbing her board - but then suddenly she was skidding into the snow, landing back-down. "Oh, what?" what one of the broadcasters said, and another was saying, "a shocker on the homestretch!" and a Swiss rider jumped ahead just before the finish line. Jacobellis came in second, bending over in disbelief. Her coach fell to the ground. She had won the silver medal, which in the context in which it had happened felt like winning nothing. "As a snowboarder, I bow my head in shame."

Since that race, she has tried, in turns, to capture the one thing missing from her career - an Olympic gold - and tell herself that the gold medal doesn't define her. She failed to medal in the next two subsequent Olympics, finishing fifth in 2010 and seventh in 2014, where she took a spill with a big lead in a semifinal race. In all those years since Turin, she has overcome serious injuries, including an anterior cruciate ligament tear in 2012. One of the people competing with Jacobellis on Friday was 4 years old at the time of the Turin mishap.

Those 2006 Olympics were the first time that snowboard cross was featured as an event. Such is the capricious nature of the sport - collisions, crashes, come-from-behind wins - that entering Friday, eight riders had won the nine women's medals.

Snowboard cross is a one-day event of pure mayhem, and on Friday a field of 25 was narrowed through timed heats, for seeding, followed by a three-round tournament of six-person races. The course was four-fifths of a mile of snowy dips and jumps. As in short-track speedskating, collisions are commonplace.

Two other Americans, Faye Gulini and Meghan Tierney, were eliminated in the quarterfinals round.

After her race, Jacobellis talked briefly about her future and said she wasn't yet thinking about whether this would be her last Olympics. But she did reflect on her failure in Turin and acknowledged that her low point had in fact helped grow the sport.

"Well, yeah," she said. "You could say that. It's definitely brought more attention to the sport. How often do you remember the second-place medalist? Most of the time you only remember the first place. So, that's just how it went down."