2-27 IAT Kaitlyn

By now we have all heard the fabulous story of Kaitlyn Farrington who won the gold medal in women’s snowboard half pipe at the Olympics in Sochi. Certainly fair to say that she is the pride of Hailey, Idaho right now. Kaitlyn’s family raises beef and she told reporters at a press conference that when she started competing in bigger snowboarding events, her dad had to sell his cows just to get her to those bigger events across the country. Josh Loubek is a Freestyle skier who helped start the trend of skiing in the half pipe, went on to become a professional skier and at the end of his career has become an Olympic judge. In fact he was the head judge in Sochi for several skiing events. I talked with him. “Did you see Kaitlyn Farrington complete? Yes. And what was amazing is that the conditions of the half pipe were really difficult. That was because of weather. It was warm, it had snowed a little bit and it created difficult conditions. There was a challenging aspect of it for the girls in general to make it through their run without falling and really going for it. She had to battle through that with all of the other girls and not only did she do that but her run was technically way harder than everybody else. She was doing extra rotations and different types of grabs and all of that. So her run was incredibly technical.”