The year 2011 continued to be a good one for Kelly. In addition to winning the Winter X Games and stomping the first-ever women’s frontside 1080, Kelly won the O’Neill Evolution Halfpipe Event in Davos, Switzerland; the Burton European Open Pipe in Laax, Switzerland; the Canadian Open in Calgary; as well as the Dew Tour Snow Basin and Overall Dew Cup in Snow Basin, Utah. She won the Mammoth Grand Prix in March, and she won both the Burton U.S. Open in the halfpipe and was the overall leader in the Burton Global U.S. Open (BGOS), a series of competitions staged around the world. That month she also dominated in the Euro X Games. In August, she won the New Zealand Open Halfpipe (for the third year in a row), and then took first at the U.S. Grand Prix at Copper in Copper Mountain, Colorado, in December. That year Kelly was nominated for two ESPY awards. And she continued to be featured in Burton ads.
Her winning season took her into 2012 with a streak of sixteen wins. However, that streak was broken at the Burton U.S. Open in March, where she came in second.
Ten years after winning her first gold, and eight years after finding God at the bottom of the pipe, Kelly continues to strive for excellence in her sport by remaining focused, consistent, and intentional. As a member of the U.S. Snowboarding team, she looks forward to her fourth Olympic appearance in 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
Snowboarding made its grand entrance at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. The first modern Olympic Games were a project of Pierre de Coubertin in France. Many had tried to bring back the Olympics, but de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894 with the aim to organize the first modern Olympics. In 1896, the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece. In 1924 the IOC decided to have an International Winter Sports Week in Chamonix, France. Two years later, that event was retroactively named the first Winter Olympic Games.
Until 1992, the Winter Olympics were held during the same year as the Summer Olympics. Now the Winter Olympics are held within two years of the Summer Olympics, but they still maintain a four-year rotation. At that “first” Winter Olympics in 1924, the sports were bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, figure and speed skating, skiing — cross-country and ski jumping — and the military patrol race.
Little by little, snowboarding gained recognition until it finally appeared in the Olympics. Now fast-forward to 1998 when for the first time, Olympic events included the halfpipe and the giant slalom in men’s and women’s competitions.
The parallel giant slalom replaced the giant slalom at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. In 2010, the men’s and women’s boardercross was added. When the Winter Olympics take place in Sochi, Russia, in 2014, spectators will see eight events: men’s and women’s halfpipe, men’s and women’s parallel giant slalom, and men’s and women’s boardercross, along with the addition of snowboard slopestyle. Spectators will see all of the action at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park. The 8,000-seat facility will begin hosting events in 2012, and will continue to feature world-class competition after the 2014 Olympics.
Kelly Clark, who at age eighteen was the youngest member of her 2002 U.S. Olympic Snowboarding team, will make an appearance in her fourth Winter Olympic Games when she competes in the halfpipe event in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. Kelly will be thirty years old then, but the sport of snowboarding will still appeal to the young, and the young at heart.