Got the Monday morning blues? How about this to help brighten your day: Jenny Jones has absolutely bossed the most recent Olympic qualifier that went down at Cardrona, NZ over the weekend, scoring a second place behind Jamie Anderson.
Despite some truly god-awful weather conditions, Jenny managed to put down a run that included a backside 360 indy and frontside 720 indy to better Cheryl Maas who finished in third.
Understandably she was pretty chuffed:
I’m stoked to make the final and actually land my run in the final because the other World Cups I’ve done I crashed. So I was like ‘please land on your feet’.
The result bumped Jenny up from 8th place to 2nd place in the overall slopestyle rankings and pretty much guarantees that she’ll qualify for Sochi 2014 – barring a freak result/injury/not-so-divine intervention of course…
The podium is very helpful. It was worth the 2,000 pound flight to come here. I’m absolutely delighted. Today was tough: it’s on, it’s off, your heartbeat goes up and down. It’s been like that since 8AM till 4PM
Aimee Fuller and Katie Ormerod – Britain’s two remaining female Olympic hopefuls – weren’t quite able to put down solid runs in their heat finishing in 9th and 10th places respectively.
Billy Morgan rode in the second heat of the mens qualis and finished in a very respectable fourth place behind Gjermund Braaten, Clemens Schattschneider and Ulrik Badertscher. Sadly though, no thanks to the crappy weather (which didn’t look too dissimilar from a day up the ‘gorms if we’re being honest), the entire men’s comp was cancelled rendering Billy’s result redundant.
However, he remains in an incredible second place in the overall slopestyle world ranking list going into the next World Cup event at Copper Mountain, Colorado on the 22nd December.
Shaun White on the other hand, who has already set aside a space in his trophy cabinet for an Olympic slopestyle medal but has yet to make any mark on the rankings, did not deliver the goods in his heat, crashing out with an ankle injury.
The ginger ninja has still got a bunch of work to do if he wants to get anywhere near that slopestyle podium in February, and with only a handful of World Cup events remaining before the main event, he sure is cutting it fine…
Here’s to a speedy recovery though!