Redemption, Heartbreak, And Hot-Dogging: The Tale Of Lindsey Jacobellis

I had forgotten the entire story of Lindsey Jacobellis blowing her gold medal until the opening ceremonies last Friday night, when she was introduced by NBC with that story draped around her shoulders like a moldy, moth-eaten coat. "Here she is," they seemed to be saying. "Showing her face and everything!"

Jacobellis' field is women's snowboard cross. At the 2006 Olympics in Torino, she was way out in the lead, a few seconds from a gold medal, when she embellished with a little celebratory grab of the end of her board, then crashed and gave up the gold, settling for the silver.

Thus did she pass into legend: Lindsey Jacobellis, symbol of foolish pride, poster girl for hot-dogging.

Last night's events and Visa commercials, after the jump.

 

I have to admit, I have a hard time getting all worked up over this particular transgression to begin with. As her colleagues have sometimes tried to explain, show-off moments seem far less controversial in snowboard cross than they are in a lot of other sports anyway. She was 20 years old, she was excited, and it ran away with her. In the space of about a half a second, she made an ill-advised decision in 2006 that she's being asked to apologize for and explain — NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth basically expressed misery at being forced to ask her about it again yesterday — four years later.

And last night, in an entirely ordinary event that has happened to a bunch of snowboard cross competitors this year (as you know if you've been watching), she wiped out and missed the finals. She then won what's essentially a consolation round, finishing fifth in the event.

No redemption for you, Lindsey Jacobellis. Or so went the commentary. She is "not destined" to win gold. Some even explained precisely how shattered she was feeling, relying on ... well, it's not clear, exactly, what columnist Jeff Passan is relying on when he says:

Even worse, after she crossed the finish line, Jacobellis needed to go down to the ski lift and jump a chair back to the top. The Small Final beckoned. It was an inconvenience, an indignity and an insult, and the ride was the longest of her life. Jacobellis looked down on the mountain, back to the fans, surveyed the entire scene. She had blown it. She had blown it again.

Perhaps she feels this way. Perhaps she doesn't. Perhaps her long list of World Cup victories reassures her, even if it does nothing for anyone else.

A Google search for Lindsey Jacobellis and "redemption" returns 26,700 results. Most of them undoubtedly have something to do with the idea that this Olympics was her payback for the last Olympics, and that redemption, here, was about winning a gold medal. But how is it reasonable to suggest that a lapse in judgment that takes less time than it takes to say the words "lapse in judgment" has to be compensated for by a feat as difficult as winning a gold medal in the Olympics? Why isn't owning up, coming back, and competing honorably your "redemption"?

This is why the Olympics impress and terrify me. In the men's figure skating last night, French skater Brian Joubert, who's an extremely accomplished guy, had a disastrous short program, and when it was over, I looked at his face and couldn't stop thinking about the amount of time that went into preparing for something that was suddenly (1) over and (2) universally declared an embarrassment. What happens to the hours of practice; are they lost? Are you supposed to assume you might as well have never shown up at all? Sometimes we're culturally good at "the journey is what matters," but not during the Olympics.

This is the price, perhaps, of the way Morgan Freeman tells the story of speed skater Dan Jansen coming back six years after his sister's death and skating a victory lap with the daughter he named after her. It's the price of "Do you believe in miracles?" We make it all about that one thing, and then that one thing — which often usually takes less than five seconds to happen — is you, forever, unless you come back four years or eight years later and another five seconds wipes out the first five seconds, and that means you get the years and months and days back. You're redeemed, and it's all worth it.

And it's all so rousing, and the swelling music is so tempting, until you're Lindsey Jacobellis and you're suddenly supposed to feel like all your efforts to recover from an eye-blink mistake are in vain, because in an event that anyone in the world could have entered, you came in fifth.