Jessica Diggins, left, and Kikkan Randall celebrate winning their gold medal in the women's cross country team sprint free final at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. Randall, 35, is retiring from Olympic sports after the games. Odd Andersen /AFP/Getty Images hide caption
In the last event of her last Olympics – she's been to five – Kikkan Randall finally did what no American woman had ever done: win a medal in cross-country skiing. And she made it a gold, as Randall and her teammate Jessica Diggins won the team sprint free final at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
Randall and Diggins snared gold by a nose, finishing 0.19 seconds ahead of the Swedish team of Charlotte Kalla and Stina Nilsson, with whom they'd been dueling for the entire race.
Dating to her first Olympics back in 2002 in Salt Lake City, Randall had never finished higher than sixth place at the Winter Games. And with plans firmly in place to retire and make a new home with her family after the 2018 Games, it seemed possible that Randall, 35, might see her career end without an Olympic medal.
Heading into today's race, all of Randall's other events in South Korea were already over, with her best showing a fifth-place finish in the women's 5km relay.
But Randall and Diggins pulled out a victory in the team sprint free, a grueling event in which two racers pass the relay back and forth three times. The "free" in the event's name refers to the technique used: In free, racers can use their skis' edges to skate and propel themselves, rather than relying only on the skis' center, as in the "classic" format.
As we mentioned in our profile of the U.S. Olympic team, Randall is the only mother on Team USA. She's also one of the first women to compete in five Olympics, along with Kelly Clark, who's also in Pyeongchang.
Randall's gold medal may finally take the sting away from her experience in the Sochi Olympics in 2014, when she lunged across the finish line in a quarter-final sprint — only to learn she'd been beaten, in an event that was supposed to break the drought.
"Randall still chokes up when she talks about Sochi," Emily Russell reported for NPR, in a recent profile about Randall. "But another beauty of the Olympics - they come around every four years. And the American team is deeper now. Spending months together racing in Europe every year means they're closer than most teams. And they're more confident than ever."
In that story that ran at the start of the Pyeongchang Games, Diggins told Russell, "We definitely have a chance at a medal."
Read Again https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2018/02/21/587513454/kikkan-randall-the-only-mom-on-team-usa-just-won-a-gold-medal-in-her-last-eventBagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Kikkan Randall, The Only Mom On Team USA, Just Won A Gold Medal In Her Last Event"
Post a Comment