Talking to the riders and watching their faces as they were about to drop it was obvious that a lot of them were feeling the pressure. More so than any other comp? Probably. After all this will only happen once every four years, and the audience is literally millions of times larger than anywhere else.
Apparently 3 million people tuned into the BBC’s coverage, and that’s just in the UK! Plus of course for most of the riders it’s probably the only comp their nans would be watching…
It got to a few people. Riders we’d usually expect to put down solid runs like Cheryl Maas, or Sarka Pancochova were stacking, and pre-Games men’s favourite Mark McMorris very nearly didn’t make the finals – as Billy Morgan said: “He was fretting up at the top, you could see it in his face.”