Winter Olympics: Jess Rich misses big air finals but defies expectations

Jess Rich defied expectations by just getting herself fit to compete in the big air competition at the Winter Olympics.

Jess Rich jumps during qualification for the women's big air snowboard competition. Picture: AP

Jess Rich’s revised ambitions at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics were not about making the ­finals, or landing her jumps or testing a new trick in her competition, the big air.

Instead, it was about showing the Australian team medical staff that she could bend her knee and sustain significant pressure on it.

Sydneysider Rich, 27, ripped her anterior cruciate ligament in training just before Christmas and has been in a race to prove her ­fitness for the Games.

For weeks she has been barely able to walk, so to compete in the big air, performing a 720 trick and then landing, was a nod to Rich’s pain threshold.

While it’s admirable that Australia has single-minded competitors driven to defy medical convention and come back from surgery to compete at the Games, the quest to compete at all costs has to be heavily weighed up.

Snowboard cross racer Belle Brockhoff is a case in point. Even though she landed heavily on her already badly damaged knee in the semi-finals of her Olympic competition, she dragged herself back up to the start of the small final to have one last shot at the course.

Why? Does her 10th place come at the cost of further damage and much longer rehabilitation?

Rich said she was “kinda sad’’ but “stoked’’ that she landed her runs but just missed the finals, finishing in 13th with a best score of 74.25. She had been ruled out of the snowboard slopestyle earlier in the week, but the big air was considered less demanding.

Rich revealed the litany of other injuries she’d encountered in the lead-up to the Games, saying there were a number of times in the past 18 months that she thought she wouldn’t make it to South Korea.

“I’ve had a broken back. I’ve broken my collarbone twice and now I’ve blown my knee. Every one of those times I was unsure I was going to be able to keep competing,” she said.

Rich has spent more time in the gym recovering from recent surgeries to her back and collarbone than competing, so she was familiar with the twice-daily gym routines required in recent weeks to keep her leg as strong as possible.

She said: “All I came out here to do was land my runs — I have to deal with what I got right now — and to just miss out on finals, yeah, it’s kinda sad. But you know, I’m stoked still.”

She said the biggest hurdle was passing the medical in order to compete and it was only a few days ago that she could begin to think about the competition.

Rich said specialists warned her she risked further injury to her knee but she convinced them that if she got it strong enough to support the landings that it would be worth it.

“I have to have surgery anyway,” she said.