Parents surprise Bright in her golden moment
By Jeff Passan
WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Torah Bright almost ruined the surprise. Her parents drove six hours to the airport in Sydney, spent 20 hours more on a flight to the Winter Olympics and did all of it behind the back of the world’s best female snowboarder. At Bright’s Vancouver abode the night before the women’s halfpipe competition, Peter and Marion Bright heard her voice, and it begged for immediate improvisation.
“We hid in the closet,” Marion said. “She even came into the bedroom.”
Eventually, they slinked out, plan intact, and prepared to conceal themselves again at Cypress Mountain. It was a jig they couldn’t keep up very long, not when their daughter was winning Australia’s first gold medal of the Vancouver Games and breaking the United States’ near-decade-long stranglehold on snowboarding supremacy.
After putting in the worst first run of the 11 finalists, Bright bounced back with the best of the night, scoring a 45.0 of 50 on the strength of a switch backside 720, in which she rode opposite her dominant foot and spun into a blind landing. Once she hit that, the rest of the evening was spent taking pictures and accepting hugs, as no one – not even Americans Hannah Teter and Kelly Clark, the silver and bronze medalists – could challenge Bright’s technical supremacy.
Of course, Bright first needed to wipe the tears from her eyes. As she embraced her coach and brother, Ben, following the run, Bright noticed a familiar shock of blond hair in the crowd. The bald spot looked familiar. And only then did the 23-year-old realize mom and dad had ignored her wishes.
“I told them not to come,” Bright said. “I told them I’d prefer them at my wedding. I should’ve known they were going to come. Of course they were going to come.”
They were always coming – here and to Bright’s June wedding in Salt Lake City. Her snowboarding coronation was four years, multiple concussions and one dislocated jaw in the making. What Shaun White is to men’s snowboarding Bright is to women’s: the uber-talent whose technical ability supersedes her competitors’ by a significant amount.
“We thought we won’t rock the boat,” Marion said. “Whatever you want, Torah, you get. Well, it’s going to be a surprise then. We didn’t want it to be a shock, so we’ll hide ourselves until after the last run.”
By then, Bright, whose first name is Hebrew for “teach,” had dished a lesson in modern snowboarding, where style and grace is as important as ability to spin an obscene number of times. Particularly among the female riders, who still have yet to perfect the double-cork maneuvers that revolutionized men’s snowboarding, such artistry counts extra.
Bright’s predilection for the daring – she has attempted double corks and considered pulling one out if necessary – led to a lifetime’s worth of injuries in the past eight weeks alone. Before Christmas, Bright banged her jaw on a halfpipe, dislocating it and necessitating a chiropractor to put it back together. Since then, she has suffered multiple concussions, the double corks a doctor’s boon and rider’s thorn.
Her headaches didn’t subside until recently, and though Bright’s doctors weren’t sure they would clear her to participate, her fiancée, Jake Welch, said “she was always going to be here.” Bright couldn’t miss this, neither the huge crowd nor the recognition that comes with Olympic gold.
Overseas, advertisers will swoon at Bright’s toothy smile and intriguing accent. In Australia, everywhere from her small hometown of Cooma to Sydney and Melbourne, snowboarding will carry evermore cachet.
“I think every little girl will want a snowboard for Christmas,” said Holly Crawford, Bright’s Australian teammate.
And why wouldn’t they? Bright cuts an excellent role model: doesn’t smoke, drink or curse, as an LDS church member, and is so universally liked on the women’s snowboarding tour that even her fellow medalists and opponents’ coaches were giving her hugs and congratulating her. Certainly keeping her family close doesn’t hurt the image, either.
Best of all, Bright showed incredible perseverance following her first run, a mess in which she missed the switch backside 720 and another trick at the bottom of the pipe. Her score: 5.9.
“Falling on the first run is never good,” Bright said. “Falling twice, while I was trying to have a bit of fun with that? Yeah. That wasn’t good, either.”
While Bright went last during the first round, her low score meant she needed to go first in the second round. So she commiserated with her brother, who said he had faith, and thought to herself: This is easy.
Once Bright stuck her final trick and wiped away her tears, she retired to a holding area where the highest-scoring riders stood. Ten other riders had a chance to beat her. None could.
“Torah’s been amazing competition,” Clark said. “It’s just inspiring. Snowboarding’s a unique sport. It’s not as cutthroat or competitive. We’re happy for each other when we do well.”
No one felt as much elation as Bright’s family. The emotional yo-yo of snowboarding is palpable. Her brother knows she’ll hit a double cork in competition soon enough and set an even higher standard. And her parents, so distraught watching officials drag Bright off the X Games halfpipe following a nasty crash and so thrilled to hear over the radio that she was carrying the Australian flag at the Opening Ceremony, live vicariously through the adventures of their daughter, who seeks thrills for a living.
It was edifying, then, to have a thrill of their own. Their daughter is an Olympic champion, and that’s nothing to hide.