Connecticut’s Lindsey Jacobellis Gets Team USA’s First 2022 Olympic Gold Medal

Sixteen years ago, CT's Lindsey Jacobellis was only seconds away from winning her first Gold Medal in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, but with one more jump left to do, she became careless.

Jacobellis tried to add a flourish to her last jump, and she went down hard while Switzerland's Tanja Frieden maneuvered around the fallen snowboarder and came in first for the Gold. Here's how it went down.

For 16 years, Lindsey replayed that race over and over in her head knowing that she let her team and herself down, but she refused to give up. As a result, she won Gold Medals in 2007, 2011, 2015, and the 2017 World Championships, and because of her never-say-die attitude, at 36-years-old she's captured her first Olympic Gold!

Lindsey grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut, and began snowboarding when she was 15. She's an Olympic silver medalist, 6-time world champion, and a 10-time X Games gold medalist. She recently returned from Germany, winning the World Cup for the 31st time, making her the winningest snowboarder in history, and she's a member of the U.S. Snowboardcross Team.

Lindsey Jacobellis at the age of 36, is the oldest American woman to medal at the Winter Olympics. The following words about her 2022 Gold Medal win are from her February 9 interview with the New York Times.

“It really shaped me into the individual that I am and kept me hungry, and really helped me keep fighting in the sport, Had I won Gold in 2006, I probably would have quit the sport at that point, because I wasn’t really having fun with it.”