Joh Shaw has narrowly missed out on progressing past the qualifying stage of the ladies’ snowboard giant slalom.
Joh Shaw has narrowly missed out on progressing past the qualifying stage of the ladies’ snowboard parallel giant slalom.
On a wet and windy morning at Cypress Mountain, a large crowd still turned up to support the 30 snowboarders that entered the competition.
Each athlete received two qualifying runs, one from the blue gate and one from the red gate, with the top 16 moving through to the next stage of the event.
Shaw’s first run was part of the 10th pairing and the Victorian clocked a 43.41 to leave herself some work to do in the second run.
With a number of riders coming unstuck on the tricky surface, Shaw put her all into her final run and stopped the clock at 42.69, leaving her with a combined time of 1:26.10.
It left Shaw sitting in 19th place and just half a second outside 16th place and qualification.
“My first run I was a little nervous at the top - this year my first runs have not been that strong, and I tried to fight it but it just got the better of me," Shaw said. "The second run was really good, not good enough, but I think I had a good time.”
“I fell in Torino and I didn’t want to do that so maybe I was being a bit too careful.”
“The course was really tough, it was really bumpy, soft and hard in sections and tough to see – you got rain on your goggles so you were kind of just feeling your way down.”
“I’ve still got three more World Cups in Russia, Italy and Spain so I’ll see what happens there.”
“Probably the most important thing for me (for the rest of the season) is to get my riding going again, and if I can get a podium I’d be quite happy with that.”
“Slalom is our next race, and I love slalom, so you never know.”
Austrian Marion Kreiner set the quickest qualification time of 1:22.52, half a second clear of France’s Nicollen Sauerbreij.
The next stage of competition will commence at 12.15pm (Vancouver time).
David Polglase
AOC-Vancouver