Athlete Bios
Snowboarding
Ricker goes for gold in home province
Last Updated: Friday, February 5, 2010 | 3:24 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Maelle Ricker of Canada competes during the finals of a World Cup event on February 13, 2009 at Cypress Mountain in West Vancouver, B.C. (Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)A fourth-place finish at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy, and at the 2009 world championships should be reason enough to consider Maelle Ricker an Olympic medal contender at Vancouver. But she will receive extra scrutiny, and have higher hopes, because she grew up in North Vancouver and lives in Whistler.
Ricker, 31, is a former two-event snowboarder who finished fifth in the halfpipe at the 1998 Nagano Games and 23rd at Turin. (A knee injury kept her out of the 2002 Salt Lake Games.) But Ricker has sharpened her focus on snowboardcross, the four-at-once race to the bottom.
She was the overall World Cup champion in 2008 and was second in 2009, and has been a gold medallist at the X Games twice.
Ricker finished fourth on the Olympic course at last February’s test event at Cypress Mountain, the Olympic site.
She opened the 2009-10 season with another World Cup victory in Argentina. Some of her competition for a medal in February will come from her fellow Canadian Dominique Maltais, a former overall World Cup champion and the Olympic bronze medallist four years ago.
It was in that snowboardcross final that the American Lindsey Jacobellis appeared to be coasting to a victory when she fell while trying an unnecessary trick.
Switzerland’s Tanja Frieden passed Jacobellis to win the gold, and Jacobellis recovered to win the silver. Maltais and Ricker, who fell earlier in the four-woman race, finished third and fourth.
Jacobellis is widely expected to get the gold medal that eluded her four years ago. It would not be surprising if Ricker claimed a medal that she just missed, too. Finishing fourth, she once said, “is like seeing the love of your life on the subway but never getting to meet them.”
