Old dogs’ new tricks win US gold in inaugural team snowboard

After waiting 16 years to win a first Olympic gold medal, Lindsey Jacobellis captured her second in four days on Saturday after pairing with Nick Baumgartner to win the inaugural mixed team snowboard cross event.

In a heart-pounding final race, Jacobellis frittered away the 0.04sec head start supplied by her team-mate in the first wave, but made a late move to overtake Italy’s Michela Moioli on the inside of the final right-banked turn and held on over the final jump to win by 0.20sec beneath heavy snowfall at the Genting Snow Park in the mountain village of Zhangjiakou.

Moioli and Omar Visintin settled for the silver medal, while Canada’s Eliot Grondin and Meryeta O’Dine won bronze.

Baumgartner, 40, and Jacobellis, 36, the elder statesmen of the US snowboarding team, become the oldest snowboarders to win any Olympic medal and the oldest Americans to win gold at the Winter Games since 1948, when Frank Tyler piloted the US team to victory in the four-man bobsleigh.

“We’re 80s babies and we were comin’ in hot today,” said Jacobellis, who won Team USA’s first gold of the Beijing Olympics on Wednesday in the women’s snowboard cross final, the same event where she infamously squandered a certain victory with a showboat move near the finish line at the 2006 Olympics, when she was 20.

On Saturday, Jacobellis punctuated what may have been her final Olympic ride with a similar board grab over the final jump.

“I’ve been on this team for 20 years, Nick’s been on this team for 17 years, we are like a family,” Jacobellis said. “It’s the experience in snowboard cross, because it’s so hard to replicate the same scenario, because there’s so many uncontrolled variables. It really helps to have the years behind you, so you can make the