3-4 SS Farrington

A dreamy snowboard performance in the half pipe. This is a bit of a departure from what we normally cover on Sportsman Spotlight but I just can't ignore it because there's a personal element. We have all heard the fabulous story of Kaitlyn Farrington who won the gold medal in women's snowboard half pipe at the Olympics in Sochi. Good friend and sometimes tennis partner, Josh Loubek is a Freestyle skier who helped start the trend of skiing in the half pipe, went on to become a professional skier and at the end of his career has become an Olympic judge. In fact he was the head judge in Sochi for several skiing events. I talked with him. "Did you see Kaitlyn Farrington complete? Yes. And what was amazing is that the conditions of the half pipe were really difficult. That was because of weather. It was warm, it had snowed a little bit and it created difficult conditions. There was a challenging aspect of it for the girls in general to make it through their run without falling and really going for it. She had to battle through that with all of the other girls and not only did she do that but her run was technically way harder than everybody else. She was doing extra rotations and different types of grabs and all of that. So her run was incredibly technical. So her run was incredibly technical. You know that she has a background as a beef rancher. She credited a part of her athletic prowess to having been on horseback a lot and developing skills in balance. Do you buy into that? Absolutely. I don't know enough about horseback riding but it has a couple of things. One of it is grit. It is being tough and with her background as a rancher, that may have helped with her mentality in terms of toughing it out with the tough conditions in the pipe. I feel mentally she was very tough. A lot of the other girls were struggling with it so from a mental aspect it helped her. In terms of balance, yes. Snowboarding has that wide stance as well so she has the wide stance, balancing and core muscles that allow her to do the rotations that she is doing and a lot of leg strength to land it. I can only imagine that that helps."