High winds made Olympic women’s slopestyle final dangerous and disappointing for athletes

The snowboarders competing in the women’s slopestyle finals made history on Sunday, but it wasn’t the kind any athlete would be psyched about. Battling 30mph gusts of wind and temperatures low enough to safely keep Captain America in his deep freeze, riders crashed more often than they completed runs. The event became what USA Today’s Rachel Axon called “a war of attrition” — it came down to whether Olympians could stay on their feet rather than how artful their tricks or how big their air.

Four out of every five snowboarders wiped out in the slopestyle final. The downhill course is already high octane without added complications from wind: Slopestyle riders complete a technical portion on rails and park-like conditions before launching themselves off three consecutive, massive jumps.

When the dust (snow?) settled, Team USA’s own Jamie Anderson won the event. Afterwards, she said she wasn’t extremely proud of her run, since her tamer tricks wouldn’t normally have gotten her into the finals under less disastrous circumstances. “But considering the conditions and everything, I feel pretty good,” she added.

The International Ski Federation had already delayed the event a day. But the organizing body decided to hold the two-run (shortened from the typical three-run) final on Monday morning anyway, despite conditions that could’ve served as a tunnel for testing how aerodynamic cars are. The FIS explained their reasoning by blaming the nature of the sport, saying snowboarding “requires adapting to the elements.”

Sure, that’s true. Any sport that takes place outside on a mountain covered in snow can be affected by temperature, wind speed, and precipitation. The Olympics are also scheduled within an inch of their lives. They make helicopter parents planning out their kids’ extracurriculars look relatively chill, given the sheer amount of events that have to take place and the number of athletes who have to compete in a three-week period.

But there’s a difference between sending riders down a mountain with a “this wasn’t ideal, but the show must go on” shrug and completely setting them up for failure and injury: Australia’s Tess Coady tore her ACL during the competition when she — in her words — “got picked up by the wind.”

“It’s not what I would have expected, or how I visualized four years of preparation would end up,” said British snowboarder Amy Fuller, who came in 17th. “If you were lucky with the wind, there were some calm windows, but it wasn’t a true show of women’s slopestyle, which is a shame for our sport.”

It’s such a shame. Women slopestyle riders have been closing the gap over the past few years with the men. Anderson’s called her winning run “pretty mellow,” which it was: She pulled off a back 5, a cab 5, and front 7 (the names of tricks refers to how many rotations the rider completes, the way they spin, and the direction they take off in from the jump), after winning at Sochi by completing two 720s in her run.

Women are going bigger these days. Many of these riders are capable of taking off from a jump and executing a 1080 — three full spins — and then continuing to careen down a mountain at speeds that most people only experience outside of vehicles at amusement parks.

“That makes me feel (expletive) because we girls tried to progress,” Austrian rider Anna Gasser said, per USA Today. “We’ve been progressing, a big difference to Sochi and other contests. … It would have been cool to show that we girls are not that far apart, to show some style. I think today made us look way worse than we are.”

The spotlight of the Olympics can be remarkably cruel. While snowboarding has a loyal following, it’s a niche sport. Fair or not, the most attention any of these women were going to get in four years was during NBC’s Sunday night programming. And instead of showing the beauty of what these women are capable of, it showed who was lucky enough to get a start time that didn’t coincide with a monster gust of wind.

Gasser said most riders felt pressured to compete despite the dangers, given that this was the moment they’d been working towards for four years. But she wondered why the FIS didn’t postpone their event even though they seem to be willing to keep pushing back marquee events like Giant Slalom, and the FIS hasn’t given any answers. Sure, the speeds are even faster in GS, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that skiing boasts huge names like Mikaela Shiffrin and Ted Ligety, which are more likely to bring in viewers than slopestyle’s lesser-known athletes.

What is impressive, regardless of the outcome, is how these athletes handled battling not only each other but also a nasty weather system. They did the best they could. And it’s heartbreaking that they were robbed of the chance to make the kind of history they’ve dreamed about for four years.