holy crap I KNOW that girl! – Jill Kintner takes Olympic Bronze in BMX!
I walked into the kitchen last night right as the women’s BMX finals was about to start. Up pops the list of contestants and the American is Jill Kintner – a girl I met at RIT my freshman year! She was already world-ranked in BMX by that time, but apparently she’s made a lot of progress since then.
When we were at RIT, she became sponsored by GT, and they gave her a mountain bike. She had spent almost no time on a mountain bike at that point (only BMX), but decided to enter a mountain bike race. She and I went to this race at some ski mountain in western New York, and she totally OWNED the other girls in the dual slalom, even though it was her first race! There was a sequence of jumps that the guys were gapping, but the girls were all going over individually, and she gapped that sucker like it was nothing – the announcer went wild. She ended up crashing in her next race, and cashed in the chips after that.
Since then, she’s become the undisputed world champion of the mountain bike 4X event, and came back to BMX to qualify for the Olympic team and take Bronze last night!
Props to Jill – nice work!