Don’t worry, it’s doubtful it will land you in jail, even in Russia, where today Jenny Jones used one as part of her routine to land Britain’s first ever Olympic medal on snow, in the Women’s Slopestyle Snowboarding. It is just one of the myriad of terms associated with the sport that we will all, no doubt, become familiar with over the next few days. If you haven’t seen slopestyle yet, try and imagine doing a gymnastics routine in the middle of a ski-jump, on one ski, then doing it twice more – all in the same run.
Jenny Jones flies high en route to Bronze
In these days of ultra-protectiveness, we don’t often encounter new sports that provide a true spectacle, but I have to confess that watching the men’s event yesterday was a bit of an adrenaline rush – and that was just on TV. Listening to the commentators, however,was like encountering a niche art film without subtitles, but at least they seemed to understand what it was all about. Which is more than can be said for their bosses who pulled a live interview with one of the British competitors, because he said ‘Huck It’ on air. I looked the term up on a snowboarding website, which is obviously more than they did, and found the definition “uncontrollably throwing yourself into the air without any regard to personal or surrounding safety”. From what I saw all of the competitors were doing that (see video below), so perhaps the BBC should apologise to our Olympian for their misunderstanding.
Of course, Winter Games happening a few thousand miles away in the Caucasus were never going to push the button anything like London 2012, so controversy is always a useful media tool. Just to make sure, the BBC News department added plenty of downside to their lead-up coverage: if it wasn’t terrorism it was gay rights, corruption or the crackdown on demonstrations by the locals. Journalists clearly didn’t want to go to Russia in the first place, so they needed to make damned sure nobody else would either. Never mind the quality of our competitors who have given-up as much of their time to get to Sochi as our summer games athletes did to get to London, feel the width of those riot sticks.
They knew they were on safe ground. After all, we’ve only ever won 22 medals in total over the 90 years that the winter games have been staged, so who would want to travel to such a dangerous and bigotted place just to see our athletes fail en masse? And without too many UK spectators to feed their real experiences back via social media, the ‘official’ coverage could be a mixture of how lame we are on ice and snow, mixed-in with the usual montages of poor organisation, lack of accommodation, sky-high prices, yah-dee-yada. And then along came Jenny Jones on day two and ripped their storylines to shreds – bless her!
There’s also a great backstory here, because this isn’t just some precocious teenager that used to spend her time terrorising pensioners in the local park by skateboarding at them. Jenny Jones is 33 years old and comes from Bristol, hardly famous as a winter sports centre. She learned to snowboard on dry slopes and has been professional since winning her first British Championship back in 1999. Jenny has been at the top of a sport, that most consider more a teenage phase than a serious competition, ever since, and has won numerous world tour events as well as being a three-times champion at the X-Games, the pinnacle of this type of activity. She had decided to retire a couple of years ago, but when her event was announced as being included in these Olympics, she decided to postpone that and give it a go. The result – a Bronze Medal.
It may be too much to ask that our Winter Olympians can give us the lift that their summer compatriots managed 18-months ago, but with our best winter result since the war being just a Gold and a Bronze in Salt Lake City in 2002, we are already half-way to that with two full weeks to go. Even if we can’t beat it, maybe we can create a wave of optimism to send the grey clouds scurrying away, preferably along with BBC News’ Russian correspondents.