Jamie Anderson will soon be tricking down the slopes of Beijing, attempting to become slopestyle snowboarding’s first three-time consecutive Olympic champion.
This weekend, however, she’s back at the X Games, where she’s won more slopestyle gold medals than any athlete in the history of the event. The most decorated woman in the history of X Games added to her already massive collection on Friday night in Aspen, Colorado, winning silver in slopestyle for her 20th career medal.
The South Lake Tahoe, California, native wasn’t the only American woman on the podium, either. Olympic bronze medalist Brita Sigourney and Hanna Faulhaber, both of whom were also named to the Olympic team this week, took second and third in women’s halfpipe skiing.
With her 20th X Games medal, Anderson tied Canada’s Mark McMorris for the most ever. She fell on her first two runs but found her groove with her third and fourth, with tricks including a pair of 1080s. As well as she rebounded, however, it wasn’t enough to move ahead of New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, 20, whose back-to-back 1080s helped her win the gold medal. Although Anderson is the two-time reigning Olympic slopestyle champion, Sadowski-Synnott could be her biggest threat to ending that run.
Faulhaber, from Basalt, Colorado, will make her Olympic debut in Beijing. This was also her X Games debut, having earned her first-ever invitation to compete back in December shortly after the 17-year-old earned her first major podium with a third-place finish at the Dew Tour.
