There were no tail grabs for this tiger, but French snowboarder Lucile Lefevre was yesterday a crowd-pleaser at the Big Air Shougang all the same.
The 26-year-old helped Beijing ring in the Year of the Tiger by putting on an orange-and-black big-cat costume during qualifying in the women’s big air and miming a pair of claws while about 6m off the ground.
Lefevre decided a year ago that the Beijing Olympics would be her last snowboarding competition, then hurt her knee during last week’s slopestyle event. The injury prevented her from trying any tricks coming down the 47m big air ramp, but she still wanted to participate.
Photo: AP
She borrowed tiger costume from Swiss snowboarder Nicolas Huber, giving a little flair to her otherwise straight-forward jumps.
Lefevre took the first of her three runs in her standard French jacket, amusing spectators by waving to cameras instead of performing tricks.
She broke out the tiger jumpsuit for Round 2. Lefevre scratched at the air for that jump, but after watching a replay, she realized the motion just looked funny in mittens. So on her final turn, she waved toward the judges’ tower instead.
“It was not super beautiful,” she said of her claws. “So I decided for the last one to just say hi to the judges, and especially the French one, because it’s a friend of mine.”
Asked why Huber had the costume to begin with, Lefevre said that “he’s a crazy man, actually.”
The 27-year-old Huber has been wearing it for a series of videos on his Instagram, apparently inspired by Lunar New Year celebrations that overlapped with the start of the Winter Games.
Lefevre finished dead last, but that was no bother for a two-time Olympian who never figured on being here.
She said she wanted to go out with a message.
“Right now, there is a lot of problems in the world, and if everyone is peace and easy, the world will be better for sure,” she said.
Inter’s defense of their Italian Serie A title was hit with a setback on Sunday as they lost 1-0 at home to AS Roma, while Scott McTominay netted a brace as SSC Napoli beat Torino 2-0 to go top of the table. No fixtures were played on Friday or Saturday because of the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome, meaning the full round of Serie A matches took place on Sunday and yesterday. Matias Soule’s first-half strike for Roma knocked Inter off top spot earlier in the day before new Napoli opened up a three-point buffer with victory in Sunday’s
FOCUS: ‘We came out here with a goal in mind ... to keep our foot on their throat and on their neck, and continue to play 48 minutes of basketball,’ Donovan Mitchell said The Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday thrashed the Miami Heat to cruise into the next round of the NBA playoffs as the Golden State Warriors battled past the Houston Rockets 109-106 to move to the brink of a series victory. After pounding Miami 124-87 in game three on Saturday, No.1 Eastern Conference seeds Cleveland once again piled on the misery for their outclassed opponents with a crushing 138-83 victory to complete a 4-0 series win. The 55-point drubbing was the largest series-clinching victory in NBA playoff history and sets up a series against either the Indiana Pacers or Milwaukee Bucks in
Freddie Freeman homered and drove in four runs, Shohei Ohtani also went deep and Roki Sasaki earned his first major league win as the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves 10-3 on Saturday night for their seventh straight victory. The Dodgers have won the first two games of the series to improve to 5-0 against Atlanta this year. Los Angeles’ three-game sweep at home early in the season left the Braves 0-7. Sasaki allowed three runs and six hits over five innings. The 23-year-old right-hander gave up a home run to Ozzie Albies, but received plenty of offensive support in his
Shuttler Lin Chun-yi yesterday kept Taiwan on the board as they faced their first major challenge of the group stage after marching into the last eight at the Sudirman Cup Finals in Xiamen, China. Taiwan were losing 3-1 to South Korea as of press time last night, with only the men’s doubles match remaining. Taiwan and four-time champions South Korea have already progressed to the quarter-finals, after Taiwan on Monday blanked the Czech Republic 5-0 without giving up a single game. Before last night’s tie, Taiwan were undefeated in Group B, with a 9-1 match record, ahead of South Korea, who, although also
RSS