Teal Harle of Campbell River looked up at the scoreboard after his second run in men’s ski big air and held out his hand and made the thumbs down gesture.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at the Beijing Olympics for the medal favourite, who came into the Games after winning bronze in the 2022 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, and performing five full body rotations in winning the Olympic test event held on the same smokestack-fringed Big Air Shougang Run in 2019.
But this wasn’t the test event. It was the real thing. And Aspen was two weeks ago, which is an eternity in freestyle skiing, which comes down to the day and in which results vary widely from week to week. Sometimes it’s your day and sometimes it’s not.
Harle has six World Cup podium appearances and will have more. But he’ll have to wait four more years for another shot at the Olympics in big air at Milan-Cortina, Italy, in 2026. The event made its debut in Beijing.
Reports out of the sa国际传媒 pre-Games training camp had Harle on form and nailing daring routines. The 25-year-old appeared ready to pop one. Harle was performing some “mind-bending” jumps in practice, said Olympic-medallist and CBC freestyle analyst Alex Beaulieu-Marchand.
But it comes down to the day. Harle fell on all three of his runs Sunday at Big Air Shougang, the last landing so violently that his skis exploded off their clamps and flew off his boots. At least he went out attempting a daring move. That’s the freestyle way. Evan McEachran was the only Canadian to advance to the 12-jumper Olympic final today.
The Olympics aren’t over for Harle, who works as a fishing guide during summers, a passion from growing up in the Island city that bills itself as the salmon capital of the world.
He will again be a medal threat in his best event, slopestyle, beginning next Monday. Harle brushed against the bronze in the event in his Olympic debut at Pyeongchang in 2018 with a fifth-place performance, missing the podium in slopestyle by just 2.40 points. Of his six World Cup medals, two have been gold in slopestyle, so the podium in Beijing is a possibility.
Harle’s aunt Shawnee Harle won two national championships in basketball as a guard in Kathy Shields’ University of Victoria dynasty of the 1980s and has been to the Summer Olympics twice as Canadian team assistant coach. Teal took more to snow than hardwood and was part of the generation that grew up skiing and boarding on Mount Washington. It includes 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics women’s gold-medallist half-pipe freestyle-skier Cassie Sharpe of Comox and freestyle snowboarder brother Darcy Sharpe, who are also both in the Beijing Winter Games.
Darcy Sharpe also had a tough start to his Olympics by placing 23rd in men’s boarding slopestyle while Canadian teammates Max Parrot won gold and Mark McMorris bronze.
Darcy Sharpe gets another shot at Olympic glory next week in his speciality boarding big air event. Cassie, like her brother also returning from a nearly year-long injury, will attempt to defend her Olympic title in women’s ski half-pipe.
Of the other Island athletes in Beijing, blue-liner Micah Zandee-Hart of Saanichton was playing the U.S. in a key group game Monday night in women’s hockey and forward Adam Cracknell was preparing to open Thursday in men’s hockey against Germany
