D10 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
b eijing OlyMPics17-year-old son and, in May, give
the commencement speech at his
son’s high school graduation.
Longer down the road, after he
stops training for races on the
weekends and he’s either finally
pushed out by the younger gener-
ation or retires on his own,
Baumgartner plans to join his
brother’s contracting company in
Colorado. He knows it will hap-
pen eventually; he’s prepared for
that.
“Someday soon I'm not going
to be able to compete at this
level,” he said. “But until that day
comes, I’m going to put the work
in, and I’m going to rise to the
occasion.”
Until then, he will muse on all
snowboarding has given him: a
long, happy career, a gold medal
and his name in the Olympic
history books alongside a life-
long friend: bib No. 5-1: Baum-
gartner, Nick, USA, 1981, and bib
No. 5-2: Jacobellis, Lindsey,
USA, 1985.expertly reading the lines of the
course to gain an inside track on
turns. They bested the Italian
pair of Visintin and Michela
Moioli, who took silver, and the
bronze medal Canadian team of
Eliot Grondin — a fan of Baum-
gartner’s since he was 10 (which
was just 10 years ago) — and
Meryeta O’Dine.
When Jacobellis finished the
race, Baumgartner was there to
mob her. He soon gathered her in
a hug-turned-fireman’s carry,
laughing and shouting indis-
criminately. Both riders were
asked whether they could return
to defend their title in four years.
“It’s obviously feasible,” Jaco-
bellis said, gesturing around her.
“It’s just I might want to try
something else or go on a differ-
ent path... right now, still
having fun and just on the high
from these last couple of days.”
Baumgartner has firmer plans
for after these Olympics. He will
return home to Michigan, hug hiscoming.... As you get older, it’s
tough to watch the young kids
kind of take over and try to push
you out of the sport. That hunger,
it’s strong.”
Baumgartner, who pours con-
crete and works as a contractor
in his non-Olympic life, barreled
down the course perhaps seeking
redemption after he was elimi-
nated in the quarterfinals of the
men’s snowboard cross Thurs-
day.
In the mixed-team event, the
men race first and then the
women line up to start, with their
starting gates dropping in accor-
dance to how fast their partners
finished the course. Baumgart-
ner finished the men’s run
0.04 seconds ahead of Italy’s
Omar Visintin, bellowing, “Woo!
C’mon Lindsey!” when he fin-
ished. He gave the most decorat-
ed snowboard cross racer in
history the head start she need-
ed.
Jacobellis took it and ran,decades in a sport with nary a
gold medal to show for it —
before Wednesday, at least —
made them both savvy and hun-
gry to win.
Snowboard cross is unpredict-
able, made slightly easier by
years of racing in every condition
imaginable — thick snow fell
throughout the event Saturday,
making the course slower. Cloud
cover made the course deceptive-
ly flat, leading the U.S. team to
alter its game plan mid-event.
“It’s so hard to replicate the
same scenario because there are
so many uncontrolled variables
that it really helps to have the
years behind you,” Jacobellis
said. “So you can make the best
execution and call what you need
to do in that moment because
you have mere seconds, if less, to
make a decision.”
“For me,” Baumgartner said,
“it’s like you get hungrier, you
want it more because you know
there’s an expiration date and it’sgartner’s national team career
and three years into Jacobellis’s,
with a familial bond sprouting
naturally.
When Jacobellis first dipped a
toe back into snowboarding after
a knee surgery, “going as slow as I
can, like on the beginner hill,”
Baumgartner was there filming
and screaming with joy at a
decibel not usually heard on the
beginner hill. When Jacobellis
wrote a children’s book about her
Olympic experience, Baumgart-
ner found it to be the perfect
reading material for when his
many teacher friends back home
in Michigan asked him to talk to
their classes.
“We are like a family,” Jacobel-
lis said. “We know the hard times,
and we know how to pick each
other up, and we can have empa-
thy for those times when every-
thing’s hard.”
They also share the key ingre-
dient that made them gold med-
alists Saturday: experience. TwoJacobellis, 36, and Baumgart-
ner, 40, made history when they
won the gold medal in mixed-
team snowboard cross’s Olympic
debut Saturday at Genting Snow
Park.
Competing in her fifth Olym-
pics, Jacobellis already was the
oldest American woman to win
an Olympic medal at the Winter
Games when she won the wom-
en’s snowboard cross event this
week, ending a 16-year wait for a
gold medal after her infamous
flub at the 2006 Games in which
an early celebration cost her first
place. Now she has two.
Baumgartner, at his fourth
Games, is the oldest snowboard-
er to win an Olympic medal and
the oldest U.S. gold medalist at
the Winter Games since 1948,
when 43-year-old Frank Tyler
steered Team USA to a win in
four-man bobsled.
“I’ll get him next time,” said
Baumgartner, whose first career
medal came after 12 years of
trying.
Jacobellis and Baumgartner
joined other experienced athletes
who have found a youthful en-
ergy in Beijing. With a silver in
the downhill, France’s Johan
Clarey, 41, became the oldest
Olympic medalist in the history
of Alpine skiing; 35-year-old
Dutch speedskater Ireen Wust
became the first athlete to earn
individual gold medals at five
Games by winning the 1,500 me-
ters in Olympic record time; and
Germany’s Johannes Ludwig
won his first Olympic singles
luge gold at 35.
Here’s where it’s important to
point out that “old,” in this sense,
is relative to the fact that snow-
board cross is a high-speed mix
between snowboarding and mo-
tocross racing associated mostly
with young thrill-seekers and
not, as Jacobellis pointed out,
“seasoned” athletes who prefer
10 to 12 hours of sleep a night.
Those in their late 30s and 40s
don’t traditionally compete in a
sport that wrecks, among other
things, knees, necks, backs and
occasionally work-life balance.
But in Beijing, Jacobellis and
Baumgartner are doing what rid-
ers do best. Snowboarding in its
more traditional iterations is all
about progression, riders push-
ing each other to perform tricks
with more rotations and higher
amplitudes for no other reason
than to see if they can.
Instead of testing the limits of
what snowboarders can do,
Baumgartner and Jacobellis are
pushing the limits of who snow-
boarders can be.
“You’re never too late to take
what you want from life and
follow your dreams,” Baumgart-
ner said. “You let yourself down if
you quit too early.”
They were paired together Sat-
urday having been U.S. team-
mates for 17 years, all of Baum-
SNOWBOARDING FROM D1
For Americans Baumgartner, Jacobellis, a ge is just a number
BEN STANSALL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Lindsey Jacobellis, bottom left, and N ick Baumgartner, above her, became the oldest gold medalists in Olympic snowboarding history in Zhangjiakou, China, on Saturday.BY DAVE SHEININbeijing — Six thousand two
hundred and seven miles from
the Ice Cube in Beijing’s Olympic
Park, John Shuster’s people were
gathered around televisions in
the Gold Medal Lounge in Du-
luth, Minn., in the wee hours of
Saturday morning, hoisting
$1 drafts in his honor.
Well, truthfully, they were
pounding beers because it’s what
curlers do. But the Duluth Curl-
ing Club’s most famous member
was in the Olympics again, and
because of that, the lounge —
which looks out over the club’s
rink — extended its hours for the
midnight CST start. And if noth-
ing else, it was worth toasting
Shuster for that.
“We’re running out of pitch-
ers, and now we’ve got Jell-O
shots going out,” bartender
Brooke Heikkila reported via
telephone just before Shuster led
teammates Christopher Plys,
Matt Hamilton, John Landstein-
er and Colin Hufman onto the ice
in Beijing for a round-robin
game against Norway — a game
that, much like the watch party
back home, started with great
expectations but soon fizzled
out.
It was another packed house
in Duluth, with around 75 mem-
bers squeezed into the lounge.
They were loud and raucous —
“We almost didn’t hear the
phone ring,” Heikkila said —
cheering every hit, guard and
angled double runback pulled off
by the Americans.
The atmosphere at the Gold
Medal Lounge, named for Team
Shuster’s signature achievement,
was undoubtedly better than the
one in the Ice Cube — the same
arena where Michael Phelps won
eight swimming gold medals in
2008 , when it was known as the
Water Cube. Here, on Saturday
afternoon, the stands were most-
ly empty because of the severe
covid-19 restrictions — and sadly,
there was no beer to be found.
They have been holding these
watch parties in the lounge for
every one of Team Shuster’s
games in these Olympics, despite
the crazy hours. The opener
against the Russian Olympic
Committee on Wednesday start-
ed at 6 a.m. in Duluth — and
Shuster’s wife, Sara, brought
their boys, Luke and Logan, by
the lounge to watch a few ends
before they had to go to elemen-
tary school.
“We love the support back
home,” Shuster said, “and we
love to give them one of their
own to cheer on at the Olympics.
We have a lot of fun with it.”
Shuster, 39, may be the most
recognizable curler in America
— a five-time Olympian and the
skip who, four years ago in
PyeongChang, led the United
States to the “Miracurl on Ice,”
the first curling gold medal in
U.S. history. In the wake of that
victory, Shuster and his team-
mates attended a state dinner at
the White House, appeared on
“The Tonight Show” and “The
Voice” and rang the bell at the
New York Stock Exchange.
But at the Duluth Curling Club
— his home rink, just across the
St. Louis River from his house in
Superior, Wis. — he’s just good ol’
Shustie, a guy who still shows up
occasionally for the Thursdaynight men’s league, a guy who
took home the 2012-13 Bagley
Trophy as skip of the men’s club
championship team. A quick
glance at the list of club champi-
ons reveals an interesting fact:
Shuster hasn’t won another one
since. He may be the reigning
Olympic champion, but the
Bagley Trophy has eluded him
for almost a decade.
“He doesn’t win the club
championship every year,” Doug
Cameron, himself the skip of the
1983-84 club champions, said via
FaceTime video. “He’s still a
spectacular curler, but when he
plays in the club championship,
he has club players for team-
mates, not Olympians.”
Indeed, it wouldn’t be very
sporting of Shuster to team up
for club championships with thelikes of Landsteiner and Plys —
both, like himself, members of
the DCC, which was founded in
1891 and is now the second-larg-
est curling club in the country. So
when he competes back home,
Shuster links up with old friends
and throws the rock between
sips of beer, the way the most
social sport on the Olympic pro-
gram is meant to be played.
“That’s one of the cool things
— yeah, we’re Olympic-level curl-
ers, and I don’t get to curl in a lot
of fun bonspiels with my club-
mates and stuff as much any-
more,” Shuster said. “[It’s great]
getting a chance to curl with
some people in my club that are
good friends. That’s something... that’s very unique to curling
as an Olympic sport.”
Cameron, 74, insisted Shus-
ter’s international successes
hadn’t gone to his head, just as
his failures hadn’t broken his
spirit. After Team Shuster went
2-7 in round-robin play in the
2014 Sochi Olympics, he was
famously dropped from the na-
tional team’s high-performance
program — but formed his own
squad, which called itself “The
Rejects” and which played its
way into another, fateful Olym-
pic berth in PyeongChang.
“I’ve known him a long time,”
Cameron said. “His wife went to
high school with my daughter.
He’s a great husband, family
man, father. I know he feels so
lucky to be able to lead the life he
does as a professional curler.
He’s still himself. He doesn’t
come around here and big-time
anybody. And we wouldn’t let
him do that.”
Like many patrons of the Gold
Medal Lounge, Cameron, 74,
competed Friday evening in the
annual Hoops Brewing Interna-
tional Open Bonspiel — a week-
end-long tournament that cost
$280 to enter, with cash prizes
awarded at the end — then stuck
around to watch Team Shuster
take on the Norwegians. Al-
though the kitchen was closed,
they had boxes of pizzas stacked
on a table, and the beers from
title sponsor Hoops, a local craft
brewery, were $1 for a pint and
$3 for a pitcher.
“We are currently having adult
beverages and incredibly intelli-
gent conversation,” Cameron re-
ported just before midnight Fri-
day night Duluth time. And how
did his team do in the Bonspiel
that evening? “We were very
much victorious,” he said.In 2020, Cameron had been
the lead on the championship
team of the same bonspiel — a
team that has retained its status
as defending champs entering
this weekend by virtue of the
2021 edition being canceled be-
cause of the pandemic.
But not every member of his
team takes the bonspiel as seri-
ously as Cameron, and unfortu-
nately, he had to elevate himself
to skip this year — because his
former skip skipped town on the
rest of his teammates, choosing
to curl in another tournament on
the same weekend.
“I still can’t believe Shustie
gave up the opportunity to de-
fend our title in the bonspiel to
curl in Beijing,” Cameron joked.
Half a world away, Cameron’s
jab was relayed to Shuster, who
reacted in mock horror: “I al-
most forgot I won that thing,” he
said. “What am I doing here?”
In Duluth, Cameron doubted
he would make it to the end of
Team Shuster’s game — an end
that arrived at 2:44 a.m. local
time. It was just as well if he
didn’t. The Americans fell be-
hind in the middle ends, trailing
6-3 at one point, and a late
comeback fell a point short.
Norway prevailed, 7-6, dropping
Shuster and his mates to 2-2 in
pool play.
The crowd at the Gold Medal
Lounge thinned out steadily in
the hours after midnight, as
Team Shuster fell behind. And
five minutes after it was over, the
place was already dark and emp-
ty, the chairs up on top of the
tables, the only sound the tele-
phone behind the bar ringing,
unanswered.A strong showing in Minnesota watches U.S. curling’s poor outing in ChinaELOISA LOPEZ/REUTERS
U.S. skip John Shuster is a member of the Duluth Curling Club in
Minnesota, the second-largest curling club in the country.