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Can Torah repeat her Vancouver heroics?

Australian snowboarder Torah Bright AAP Image/Julian Smith
Roar Guru
29th January, 2014
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The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics are just days away, so now is the perfect time to explore Australia’s top medal hopes for the ‘Other’ Olympics.

One of Australia’s biggest medal hopes is the Women’s Snowboard Halfpipe defending champion, Torah Bright. Bright is set to become the first woman to compete in three snowboard events at the one Olympics when she competes in the Halfpipe, Slopestyle and Snowboard Cross.

Some, however, have raised fears that she is spreading herself too thin across the three disciplines and would be better off focusing on defending her Halfpipe title.

For those not familiar with snow sports, the Halfpipe is a 180-metre long, 20-metre wide tube with seven-metre high walls cut into snow and angled down a hill.

The athletes complete tricks as they snowboard or ski down the hill, performing tricks as they move from one side of the pip to the other. Each athlete gets a score out of 100 and the highest score at the end of the competition wins.

The high degree of difficulty of the tricks performed by athletes mean that this event, like many other Winter Olympic events, is fraught with danger and the halfpipe has claimed many victims in its time, including Torah Bright.

The Snowboard Cross is effectively a 1.25 kilometre race to the bottom of the mountain.

Six athletes in each heat race across jumps, turns, embankments and mounds to get to the bottom as fast as possible. The top three racers progress and the bottom three are eliminated.

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Athletes must find a balance between generating as much speed as possible and manoeuvring through the tight turns.

As a result, this event requires a large degree of technique and skill from the competing racers and is often one of the most exciting events on the schedule.

Unlike the Halfpipe and Slopestyle events, the Snowboard cross is not decided by judges’ scores, thus it is an event which many Australians can watch and enjoy without being confused by the different tricks being performed by the competitors.

Snowboard Slopestyle is making its Winter Olympics debut at the Sochi Games and will be the first event on Bright’s schedule. The Slopestyle is an event in which athletes perform a series of jumps and tricks as they ski or board down a mountain.

The 635-metre course features rails and boxes on which the competitors can perform tricks on and three jumps, which grow bigger as the athlete moves down the course.

The athletes are judged on the tricks they perform throughout the run. They are judged on execution, degree of difficulty and transitions from trick to trick.

Following her victory at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Australia fell in love with Torah Bright, but due to the low-profile nature of snowsports in Australia very few Australians have followed her in the years since.

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The first two years following her Olympic triumph were very difficult – she got married and split from her husband, and she suffered a number of injuries.

Following the Vancouver Olympics in February 2010, Bright spent the remainder of the year away from competition, recovering from injuries sustained in the lead -up to the Vancouver games – most notably a severe concussion which almost ruled her out of the games altogether.

Following the 2011 American winter, Bright’s coach and brother Ben announced that he was no longer coaching Torah and she subsequently began training with American superstar Sarah Burke.

It was in January of 2012 that Bright’s world was turned upside down.

Burke suffered a horror crash whilst training on the Superpipe at Park City in Utah. Nine days after this crash, Burke, tragically, passed away.

As one of Burke’s best friends, Bright was one of the hardest hit by this event. The tragedy made her re-evaluate her career.

Bright has revealed that she came extremely close to retiring following Burke’s death.

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Once she overcame the psychological scars associated with the tragedy, Bright decided that she would spend the next two years focusing purely on the Sochi Olympics. She split from new coach Bud Keene and resumed working with her brother Ben.

At the beginning of 2013, Ben convinced her to attempt to gain qualification in both Slopestyle and Snowboard Cross, on top of the Halfpipe, for the Sochi Games.

Whilst Bright has competed in Slopestyle events in the past, the Snowboarder Cross came as a surprise to many. In fact, she only qualified for the 24-athlete field last week after other nations chose not to send athletes ranked higher than Bright.

While Bright just sneaked in to the Snowboard Cross field, it is important not to write her off in this event just yet.

Snowboard Cross is an event known for its unpredictability – the tiniest mistake can result in a fall and a fall by a leader can take out the remaining competitors, Steven Bradbury style.

I am not suggesting that Bright requires a multi-person crash to win this event – she is an incredibly talented snowboarder – but she will have to improve on her current best finish of eighth place in a World Cup event if she is to medal in Snowboard Cross at the Olympics.

Many of the tricks which Bright uses in the Halfpipe transfer across to Slopestyle; this is why Shaun White has been so successful in the Slopestyle event.

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Due to her focus on qualifying for the Snowboard Cross event, Bright has not competed in Slopestyle as much over the past year, however she did gain a 10th place in an event in Stoneham, Canada just a couple of weeks ago.

Bright definitely has the talent, ability and arsenal of tricks to medal in the Slopestyle event at the Winter Olympics, but like so many other events, it all comes down to whether she can land her tricks and stomp her runs.

Bright put any fears that she hasn’t put enough time and energy into her pet event, the Halfpipe, to rest last December when she blitzed the competition and won the Dew Tour event in Breckenridge, Colorado.

She scored a 95.4 in a near perfect run in her first run of the final which showed she has expanded her repertoire and is a genuine chance at defending her title.

But Bright’s main rival Kelly Clark was unable to complete her final run, a run which may have won her the event. If Bright is to win gold in Sochi, she will more than likely be required to use her more difficult tricks, which were not required at that Dew Tour event.

Torah Bright is one of the best snowboarders in the world and her heroics from Vancouver mean that she will have all of Australia watching her whilst she tries to defend her Halfpipe title in Sochi.

Bright knows that the run which won in Vancouver will not win again and she has responded by expanding her repertoire. While she remains an outside chance at medalling in Snowboard Cross, she is definitely a medal chance in the Slopestyle event.

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Be sure to come back over the weekend to get my take on Australia’s other medal hopefuls.

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