World champion snowboarder Ester Ledecka borrowed skis from American Mikaela Shiffrin to compete in the Olympic women’s super-G. NBC had already declared Austria’s Anna Veith the winner of the event after the top 19 competitors failed to beat her time. Ledecka entered her run in 26th place. She literally flew through the race. Her reaction at the end of the race, one of the biggest upsets in winter Olympics history, was one for the ages.
“I really don’t know what happened,” Ledecka said, adding she initially thought the results on the scoreboard were incorrect. “This must be some mistake, they’re going to switch the time for some others. I just saw my mum, we were watching each other, we didn’t understand.”
Ledecka, who had never won a medal in world championship skiing, was the only Olympic contestant in both snowboarding and skiing. www.theguardian.com/...
Ledecka, who is the first ever athlete to compete in both skiing and snowboarding at the Olympics, finished with a winning time of 1min 21.12sec to pip Austria’s Anna Veith by one-hundredth of a second. Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein, who finished 0.11sec off the pace, won the bronze.
“Until today,” Ledecka said, “I thought I was a better snowboarder.”
NBC had to apologize to Anna Veith and the viewing audience when Ledecka was declared the winner by 1/100th of a second. Ledecka and Veith were both models of sportsmanship, but Ledecka’s response to her victory from out of the blue was simply the best.