Women's Qualifiers

We had an awesome day yesterday, despite the fact that it started at 4am ;) We had to catch an early bus to the venue at Cypress Mountain (where the Freestyle skiing events are being held) for Emily's 10am qualifying round. After a bus ride up the mountain at what seemed like a maximum speed of about 5 miles per hour (those busses were not made to climb mountain roads!), we waited in a long line for the venue to open. Thankfully we had lots of warm clothes since the sun wasn't even up yet! Once the venue opened, we got settled into our viewing spots and connected with friends and family of some of the other athletes and waited for the event to start.

Hopefully most of you watched the coverage on TV yesterday, but Emily had an amazing competition!!! Many of the athletes yesterday had trouble with their landings, but Emily was not among them. She executed beautifully and landed both of her jumps, placing her in 5th for the qualifying round, which means she will compete 5th from last in the final on Wednesday. (Typically, it is better to perform as late as possible in the finals, as judges tend to reserve higher scoring for the end of the competition.) Of the 23 women who competed yesterday, 12 will move onto the finals, including 3 American women - Emily and her teammates Lacey Schnoor and Ashley Caldwell (who is only 16!!). This is the first time since the 1998 Olympics that any American woman has made it past the qualifying round, so the ladies had a pretty good day overall yesterday.

Here is a link to the video on the NBC Olympics website, but I've also attached the live version of Emily's second jump that I took from the stands. The shaking in the video is from Emily's dad's leg bouncing up and down next to me :)

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/assetid=df9d63ed-bc6e-4f5d-af64-8bcd08613927.html