Snowboard cross racers stretchered off after crashes

ROSA KHUTOR, Russia: Two competitors in the women’s Olympic snowboard cross event at the Sochi Games were stretchered off after crashing badly in Sunday morning’s seeding races.
Medal hopeful Helene Olafsen from Norway — the first snowboarder on the course — was taken to hospital with a knee injury.
The other casualty in the seeding run — where riders compete alone against the clock for a better seeding for the afternoon quarter-finals when there are six athletes racing together — was American Jacqueline Hernandez.
Many athletes have described the course as fast, forcing them to control their speed on certain sections rather than just go hell for leather all the way down.
It was the second time in three days Olafsen, who finished third at last year’s world championships and fourth at the 2010 Vancouver Games, had crashed.
She was also carried off on a stretcher on Friday after cutting her forehead in a fall.
“She’s being taken to the local hospital with a knee injury and she will not compete,” a Norwegian team spokesman said.
Hernandez appeared to hit her head after falling awkwardly and was also stretchered off, although she was conscious at that point.
She was also unable take part in the second seeding run.
The end of the snowboard cross course uses part of the slopestyle piste, which was heavily criticized earlier in the Games after a series of crashes.
However, the snowboard cross crashes happened further up the course before it merges onto the slopestyle track.
By the time the freestyle skiers took to the slopestyle course, a few days after the snowboarders, many were describing it as perfect.
During snowboard training on the slopestyle course another Norwegian, medal hope Torstein Horgmo, broke his collarbone in a fall while in the women’s freestyle skiing training American Heidi Kloser broke her thighbone and tore her cruciate knee ligament after crashing.
Russian freestyle skier Maria Komissarova, who fractured her spine in a ski-cross training accident, remains in a stable but serious condition.
Komissarova, 23, underwent a six-and-a-half hour operation on Saturday which was described as successful and where doctors inserted a metallic implant into her spine.