Lindsey, just fess up about hot-dog move

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Asked whether there was a chance she made the fateful move almost reflexively, he paused.

“Sometimes it’s subconscious,” he said, “but that was putting on a show.”

Nearby, his teammate, Jayson Hale, was making his way back toward the team cabin on crutches.

“It’s kind of a little victory thing,” he said. “When you’ve got that much of a lead at the end, it’s something you throw in for the crowd.”

Asked if he had ever seen anything like what happened to Jacobellis before, Hale, too, paused.

“It happens — just not at the Olympics,” Hale said, “and not when you’ve got a gold medal in your hand.”

Didn't try anything special
But by the time Jacobellis popped up in the interview room alongside Frieden and bronze medalist Dominique Maltais, the spinning had already started.

Westcott suddenly couldn’t remember watching the jump and Jacobellis insisted she hadn’t tried anything special. Frieden recalled the time in an “X Games” race several seasons ago when she stood up too soon and got nipped at the line by Jacobellis.

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“I don’t feel bad or sad about it,” she said. “One day it’s me, it’s her the next.”

A few moments later, in a corner of the same room, U.S. coach Peter Foley sounded like he had done his apprenticeship in the NFL. He couldn’t say yes or no on the jump, Foley said, until he had a chance to look at the film.

“I’m not inside her head,” he protested.

But another few minutes after that, Foley wandered over and looked at a frame-by-frame breakdown shot by Associated Press photos.

“She didn’t need to bring it across that far,” he said. “She was trying to style it.”

Say this much about snowboarding: It may be the most wild-and-wooly thing on snow at these Games, but the camaraderie is never fake. After competitors slug it out, they hug it out, and what matters to most of them at the end of the day is whether they’ve done it all with style.

That’s the code that Jacobellis was trying to honor. The only shame is that she couldn’t bring herself to say so.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org

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