KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — Hannah Kearney hit a speed bump Saturday night. She hit two of them, in fact, a pair of French-Canadian sisters who flew and jitterbugged under the lights in the Caucasus Mountains above Sochi, leaving the world’s most dominant freestyle skier in tears, feeling worse than if she’d eaten a bad bowl of borscht.
Kearney, 27, of Norwich, Vt., won a bronze medal in women’s moguls at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, but wasn’t exactly experiencing an afterglow.
“I feel like I let myself down,” she said. “I made a huge mistake and you don’t win the Olympics when you have a huge mistake in your run. Right now I feel very disappointed.”
Kearney wasn’t just the defending champion in moguls. She was widely considered to be as close to a gold-medal lock as you can have in a snow-based sport. Turned out that slopestyling snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg captured the first American gold of the Games, and Kearney found herself at the lowest rung of the podium, looking up at 19-year-old Justine Dufour-Lapointe and 22-year-old Chloe Dufour-Lapointe. “You don’t prepare for this moment. You visualize and prepare for success,” said Kearney, who said her Olympic career was over. Eliza Outtrim of Hamden, Conn., finished sixth.
The three medalists — the top mogul skiers in the world — were the final three competitors. Justine Dufour-Lapointe made a clean, straight run over the bumps, and rung up the highest score of the night, 22.44. Chloe followed her with a 21.66, and they were sitting 1-2, with the champ about to come out of the chute.
Kearney came off the first jump a bit off balance, her left ski skidding away slightly and she had to muscle her way back into form. She hit her second jump, featuring a 360 turn and a grab of the ski, the hardest trick of the night, but had lost too many points scrambling after the jump.
Kearney praised the sisters’ competitiveness and poise, said she’d treat the bronze “as a reward for fighting.”
