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Sarah Burke was an X Games star with a grass-roots mentality a
daredevil superpipe skier who understood the risks inherent to her sport
and the debt she owed to it.
The pioneering freestyler, who helped get superpipe accepted into the
Olympics, died Thursday, nine days after crashing at a training run in
Park City, Utah.
Burke, who lived near Whistler in British Columbia, was 29.
Tests revealed she sustained "irreversible damage to her brain due to
lack of oxygen and blood after cardiac arrest," according to a statement
released by Burke's publicist, Nicole Wool, on behalf of the family.
A four-time Winter X Games champion, Burke crashed on the same halfpipe
where snowboarder Kevin Pearce sustained a traumatic brain injury
during a training accident on Dec. 31, 2009.
Wool said Burke's organs and tissues were donated, as she had wanted.
"The family expresses their heartfelt gratitude for the international
outpouring of support they have received from all the people Sarah
touched," the statement said.
Burke will be remembered as much for the hardware she collected as the
legacy she left for women in superpipe skiing, a sister sport to the
more popular snowboarding brand that has turned Shaun White, Hannah
Teter and others into stars.
Aware of the big role the Olympics played in pushing the Whites of the
world from the fringes into the mainstream, Burke lobbied to add
superpipe skiing to the Winter Games program, noting that no new
infrastructure would be needed.
Her arguments won over Olympic officials and the discipline will debut
at the Sochi Games in 2014. Burke likely would have been a favorite for
the gold medal at her sport's Olympic debut.
"Sarah, in many ways, defines the sport," Peter Judge, the CEO of
Canada's freestyle team, said before her death. "She's been involved
since the very, very early days as one of the first people to bring skis
into the pipe. She's also been very dedicated in trying to define her
sport but not define herself by winning. For her, it's been about making
herself the best she can be rather than comparing herself to other
people."
She was, Judge said, as committed to the grass roots of the sport
giving clinics to youngsters and working with up-and-coming competitors
as performing at the top levels.
"She was a great, positive person for the whole team, the whole sport,"
said David Mirota, the Canadian team's high-performance director. "She
enlightens the room, and she's great."
Burke's death is also sure to re-ignite the debate over safety on the halfpipe.
Pearce's injury he has since recovered and is back to riding on snow
was a jarring reminder of the dangers posed to these athletes who often
market themselves as devil-may-care thrillseekers but know they make
their living in a far more serious, and dangerous, profession.
The sport's leaders defend the record, saying mandatory helmets and air
bags used on the sides of pipes during practice and better
pipe-building technology has made this a safer sport, even though the
walls of the pipes have risen significantly over the past decade. They
now stand at 22 feet high.
Some of the movement to the halfpipe decades ago came because racing
down the mountain, the way they do in snowboardcross and skicross, was
considered even more dangerous the conditions more unpredictable and
the athletes less concerned with each other's safety.
But there are few consistent, hard-and-fast guidelines when it comes to
limiting the difficulty of the tricks in the halfpipe, and as the money
and fame available in the sport grew, so did the tricks. In 2010,
snowboarding pioneer Jake Burton told The Associated Press that much of
this was self-policed by athletes who knew where to draw the line.
"If the sport got to the point where halfpipe riding became really
dangerous, I think riders would do something about it," Burton said. "It
wouldn't be cool anymore."
His opinion is shared by many.
"There are inherent risks in everything," Judge said. "Certainly,
freestyle skiing has one of the greatest safety records of almost any
sport. Freestyle is a very safe sport in large part because we had to
build a safe sport in order to get into the Olympics."
In 2009, Burke broke a vertebra in her back after landing awkwardly
while competing in slopestyle at the X Games. It was her lobbying that
helped get the X Games to include women's slopestyle where riders
shoot down the mountain and over "features" including bumps and rails.
It wasn't her best event, but she felt compelled to compete because she
pushed for it. She came to terms with her injury quickly.
"I've been doing this for a long time, 11 years," she said in a 2010
interview. "I've been very lucky with the injuries I've had. It's part
of the game. Everybody gets hurt. Looking back on it, I'd probably do
the exact same thing again."
She returned a year after that injury and kept going at the highest
level, trying the toughest tricks and winning the biggest prizes.
A native of Midland, Ontario, Burke won the ESPY in 2007 as female action sports athlete of the year.
In 2010, she married another freestyle skier, Rory Bushfield, and they
were headliners in a documentary film project on the Ski Channel called
"Winter."
In her interview with AP two years ago, Burke reflected on the niche she'd carved out in the action-sports world.
"I think we're all doing this, first off, because we love it and want
to be the best," she said. "But I also think it would've been a great
opportunity, huge for myself and for skiing and for everyone, if we
could've gotten into the (Vancouver) Olympics. It's sad. I mean, I'm
super lucky to be where I am, but that would've been pretty awesome."
A little more than a year later, with Burke's prodding, her sport was voted in for 2014. Source: ap
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