Kelly Clark is the 29-year-old chick-stud (is there a female version for ‘stud’?) snowboarder who’s been on the slopes since she was eight. She has 10 medals, one of those being an Olympic gold for the halfpipe; now you can add her fourth gold in the X-Games’ superpipe — her third in a row.
Clark had a show unlike anything ever seen, but she needed to be historic in order to beat out Elena Hight, who threw out a backside 900 before landing a backside double alley-oop rodeo — becoming the first female to land such a feat. The only other person in history to do so is Shaun White.
Here is the news from Keith Hamm of ESPN:
Clark won her third straight SuperPipe gold, edging Elena Hight by less than a point.
“I guess I had a lot of time to hang out at the top and think about it,” Hight said. “I was trying to decide if I should throw (the double rodeo) first run or not, but that’s what I came here to do, so I thought I’d just throw it.”
Hight’s score of 90 points held strong throughout the competition until two-time defending gold medalist Clark — spinning a frontside 1080 out of the gate, straight into a Cab 720 — delivered a more technically difficult run on her final attempt to upset Hight by just three-tenths of a point.
Clark has had frontside 1080s dialed in for a while now, but previously she always threw them at the bottom of her run. Saturday night, she opened with the trick.
Asked whether her intention is to get back-to-back 1080s worked into her pipe run, Clark answered, “I would like to work toward Cab 10s, but really I just think it shows mastery of a trick to get it in up top. When the judges see me doing a Cab 7 out of a front 10 first hit, it shows that it’s not something that I can just land sometimes, this is part of my run. Tonight was the most technical run I’ve ever put together.”
The victory earned the 29-year-old Olympian the discipline’s first three-peat and a 10th X Games medal.
I’m not sure if anyone’s been calling, but they need to. Someone needs to get this girl some endorsements, STAT!
