One Bad Crash Hurts Two U.S. Ski Stars

Early this week at the Olympics in Vancouver, the competition between two rivals resulted in a bad ending. 

Lindsey Vonn, the 26-year-old top skier for the U.S., was competing in the giant slalom when she lost all control and tumbled into a blue net on the slope. Unfortunately, Vonn broke her finger. But this wasn’t the only problem that would arise on the course.

Julia Mancuso followed her teammate, but because of the 60 seconds time spans in between each of the women’s starts, there wasn’t enough time to alert Julia of Lindsey’s accident.

Now of course, there is always going to be rivalry between two girls competing for the same country and for the top spot. Julia was waved down in the middle of her timed race, signaling that she should stop because Lindsey wasn’t fully out of the way. Julia was extremely upset by having to stop in the middle of her race, and wouldn’t you be too if you were “in the zone” and “going for gold,” but were abruptly stopped?

Julia was allowed to restart her race, but it wasn’t like she was next in line to go back on the course. She had to wait. Unfortunately, she didn’t do well on her “redo” shot at gold. She didn’t even place. Let me just say that Julia wasn’t the happiest person in Vancouver that day. She wasn’t exactly pleased that Lindsey was the cause of her stopping.

Now when I first heard about this story, my immediate response wasn’t, “she is being a poor sport”, but why didn’t the officials stop her from going down the course if they knew something had gone wrong below?

First, not everyone is perfect, and clearly the officials can not do everything right. But the officials couldn’t get the job done here because the accident happened almost at the same time as Julia started.

The second thing I thought about is how angry Julia must have been for wanting to win a gold so badly, but then she said some bad things about her teammate. There is no excuse for poor sportsmanship, and Julia should never have let her emotions get the best of her.

Though it is hard to not win after all that training, she should have been more accepting that Lindsey was injured and caused her to stop, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Below, you guys can post comments on this unfortunate Olympic race and your reactions to everything that happened in Vancouver.