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| Sage Kotsenburg wins first Olympic gold in men's slopestyle competiton - Washington Post Posted: 08 Feb 2014 08:30 AM PST Photos: View Photo Gallery: American wins shocker in slopestyle, U.S. women's hockey defeats Finland, plus downhill skiing action from Saturday. KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — With his long blonde hair sprouting out of a tan knit cap, Sage Kotsenburg took a deep breath, not fully prepared for what was coming next. Out of the best snowboarders in the world, they were about to announce the most unlikely of gold medal recipients. Kotsenburg, his laid-back lingo native to the slopes, later said he was "stoked" after such a "sick" men's slopestyle competition. But even after his name was announced, the affable 20-year old from Park City, Utah, stood shocked on the Olympic podium, wearing a frozen, immovable smile. He'd won the first gold medal of these Olympics and the first ever rewarded in the slopestyle event. "I'm pretty surprised I won, honestly," he said. How unlikely was Kotsenburg's gold medal win? Well, consider this: He won a Grand Prix event three weeks ago in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. Before that, he was stuck in a "mega drought" and by his own recollection hadn't won a snowboard competition since he was 11. "Coming here and winning, I can't even describe the feeling," he said. "It's so cool." The slopestyle event — a steep snowboard course featuring long rails and big jumps — debuted at these Sochi Olympics and made headlines earlier in the week when American Shaun White, the most famous athlete the sport has known, dropped out of the competition. By comparison, Kotsenburg was among the least-known participants. "I woke up today not even really thinking about the finals," he said, "thinking about semifinals first." Photos: View Photo Gallery: The 2014 Sochi Olympics will feature official team uniforms that range from the conservative to the ridiculous. A total of 20 riders hit the mountain Saturday morning, competing for one of four remaining spots in the afternoon finals. Kotsenburg posted the second-highest mark and was the only American to advance. "Whoa how random is this I made finals at the Olympics!!!" he tweeted to his supporters. He figured he had nothing to lose in the finals. He called his brother and said he was considering the unthinkable: throwing a trick on the biggest stage imaginable that he'd never before attempted. It's called a 1620 Japan — imagine 4½ rotations with a behind-the-back board grab — and he nailed it, capping off a stylish run where an array of board grabs impressed more than any big eye-popping jumps. "I had no idea I was even going to do a 1620 in my run until, like, three minutes before I dropped," he said. "That's kind of what I'm all about, just kind of being random." Kotsenburg had no clue how the judges would receive it. Since Thursday's qualification round, snowboarders had been scratching their heads, trying to decipher the Olympic scoring. Kotsenburg was among the most vocal riders earlier in the week, saying judges were encouraging "robotic" jumps and not rewarding creativity. "A lot of people in snowboarding spoke out about what they thought about the judging. Maybe they saw it," he said. "When you have a whole community of snowboarders thinking the judging is off, you got to take something into consideration, like, 'Hey, maybe we should be rewarding this more.'" Evolving sports of the Winter OlympicsImpressed by Saturday's run in the finals, the judges gave Kotsenburg a score of 93.5 — "Pretty sick to see that some weird, creative stuff got rewarded," he'd say later — and then the American rider had to hold his breath as he watched the rest of the field try to top his mark. One by one they came down, flipping, spinning and in some cases, falling. With such a high score to beat, many had to go big and it cost them. Even those who stayed on their feet didn't always get the scores they wanted. Mark McMorris impressively landed two triple corks — Kotsenburg didn't even attempt one — but the Canadian rider finished the competition in third place with a score of 88.75. "We're not really knowing what's going on with the judges," said Canadian rider Maxence Parrot, the fifth-place finisher. "We don't know how they score us, we don't know what they're looking for on the slope. That, I think, is the thing we should get in other contests: to know what judges want to see in the jumps." McMorris, a gold-medal favorite who was competing with a broken rib, didn't hide his disappointment with the scoring in the early rounds, but he refrained from being too critical after his bronze-winning run Saturday. "Just to ride the way I want to ride is the most important thing," McMorris said. "The rest is up to the judges, and I'm happy with everything, the outcome. A lot of people think it should have been different, but I'm going to still smile and represent Canada the best I can." Kotsenburg's score held up. Norway's Staale Sandbech took silver with a 91.75, and the judges seemed to make a statement Saturday. Style and creativity mean something, and few Olympic riders showed more personality on and off the board than Kotsenburg. He was mugging for cameras and waving to the crowd. On the podium, when he heard his name called, he hugged his competitors and invited them to join him on the top step. On the biggest stage, Kotsenburg went for broke, not letting expectations, his own modest history or anything else dictate his run. "That's what snowboarding is all about. It's based off doing what you want to do," Kotsenburg said. "There's no blueprint to snowboarding. You can really make your own mark and put your own flair on tricks." |
| Younger women outspoken about Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow - Los Angeles Times Posted: 08 Feb 2014 07:53 AM PST Sarah Seltzer grew up a fan of Woody Allen movies — her parents showed her "Sleeper," "Annie Hall," and "Everyone Says I Love You" once she was old enough to get the jokes. As a 31-year-old writer living in New York, she has admired Allen's more recent work, the bittersweet "Midnight in Paris," the meaty roles for women in "Blue Jasmine." So when the New York Times website published an open letter from Allen's adopted daughter Dylan Farrow last week, alleging that the director sexually assaulted her at age 7, Seltzer was thrown. The first time Allen's relationship with Dylan made news, during his ugly custody battle with her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow, in the early 1990s, Seltzer was too young to understand the story. Now she was chilled by it. "I found the letter deeply convincing and very sad," Seltzer said. "I felt very sorry for Dylan and for all the pain that she testified to in the letter. I sort of remember hearing stories about this when I was in elementary school, but it was a little over my head." PHOTOS: The many movies of Woody Allen Allen, who had kept mum all week, responded in a New York Times letter of his own which went online Friday night. "Of course, I did not molest Dylan," said the filmmaker, whose "Blue Jasmine" is up for three Academy Awards and first Broadway musical is a month from beginning previews. "No one wants to discourage abuse victims from speaking out, but one must bear in mind that sometimes there are people who are falsely accused and that is also a terribly destructive thing." Some of the most vocal and aggrieved reactions to Farrow's letter have often come from women under 40. These include 27-year-old "Girls" creator Lena Dunham, who called Farrow's words "courageous"; film director Miranda July, 39, who tweeted an excerpt of a 1976 People magazine interview in which Allen joked about sharing a love nest with 12-year-old girls; and 17-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson, who engaged in a conversation with her Twitter followers about whether she could still watch Allen's movies. "I've loved his movies and cited them over the years but I don't want to contribute any more to a culture that tells survivors of abuse that their voices do not matter," Gevinson tweeted. It's predictable, perhaps, that the demographic most outwardly troubled by the renewed allegations is a group more likely to identify with 29-year-old Dylan Farrow than with her 78-year-old father. PHOTOS: Behind the scenes of movies and TV "It's not surprising that a new generation has found Woody Allen, cause he makes great movies," Allen biographer Eric Lax said. "For people 40 and above, they've already lived through this cycle 20 years ago. They made up their minds one way or another. But like the 20-year cicada, this thing has popped up again." Many in Allen's younger female audience began to know him in the midst of his recent, late-career successes, a period in which he has cast appealing actresses like Scarlett Johansson, Rachel McAdams and Cate Blanchett and swoon-worthy leading men like Owen Wilson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Javier Bardem. They're also a group more apt to be frank about sexual abuse. According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, around 1 in 5 girls in the U.S. suffers some form of sexual molestation during childhood. While rape is an ancient issue, talking openly about it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Women under 40 have grown up attending Take Back the Night rallies on their college campuses and reading blog entries about sexual abuse on websites like Buzzfeed and Jezebel; a post on Buzzfeed from this past week, a beginner's guide to rape culture, has been recommended on Facebook 31,000 times. PHOTOS: Woody Allen's highest grossing films "Sensibilities have changed," said Illinois writer Roxane Gay, 39, who penned a piece supportive of Dylan Farrow on Salon. "We're more inclined now to give the victim the benefit of the doubt. As a woman who's experienced sexual violence, I'm predisposed to believe the victim." Many of the young women sharing their feelings about Dylan Farrow on social media aren't old enough to remember the first time the director's family drama erupted publicly, after Allen began dating Mia Farrow's 19-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, whom he later married. At that time an investigative team from the Yale-New Haven hospital said they found no evidence that Allen abused Dylan, and suggested that she had been coached, but a Connecticut judge awarded custody of Allen and Farrow's three children to Farrow. The story, dormant for 21 years, resurfaced this fall in the form of a Vanity Fair article that included interviews with Mia, Dylan and seven of Mia's other 14 children. The outrage took root on social media. During the Golden Globe Awards last month, as Diane Keaton accepted a Cecil B. DeMille Award on Allen's behalf, Dylan's younger brother Ronan tweeted, "Missed the Woody Allen tribute — did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?," a comment which has since been retweeted more than 12,000 times. PHOTOS: Celebrities by The Times On Saturday, Dylan's letter appeared on the New York Times website, on the blog of Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a column about it. (The Los Angeles Times Opinion editors were also approached about running an op-ed written by Dylan Farrow and decided not to publish it.) |
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