Kirk here with an olympic update. ONITSUKA Miyabi didn’t medal but she was clearly going for gold. First, here’s a quote from the article:
“Miyabi Onitsuka had a heavy slam on her first jump and had to be assisted off the landing area, walking under her own power but clearly shaken up. She bravely faced up to her second jump and threw a 1260 but over-rotated on the landing and was punished by the judges, giving her no shot at a medal in a competition in which the riders’ best two scores count. Another heavy crash on her third jump just compounded her pain. She finished in 11th place out of 12 finalists.”
If you open this links to the two articles, you can see rather painful photos of her falls.
I don’t know the names of the individual tricks but she was clearly not playing it safe. She was attempting tricks that even I could tell were a lot more difficult than those MURASE Kokomo did (not to denigrate MURASE’s achievement – just to note that different tricks were being attempted).
The Japanese article I’m linking to said that her fall caused her to bleed. I could see that her lip was swollen when she reponded to the interview. What heart!
I’m sure that for Miyabi the difference between a good day (a day when she sticks these tricks as she has done so many times before) and a bad day is the difference between medaling and coming in 11th. Despite the numeric result, my respect for her courage, determination, and sportsmanship grew watching this event.
One last note: On the evening news (national), NHK didn’t even mention her performance, though it did mention the two others. :(
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/61ffdb3eae1fb5fb57d8f280d2c84963839098c3
