Errant Course Worker Costs Skier Her Olympic Dream: 'Cannot Believe What Happened'
Bulgarian alpine skier Eva Vukadinova got a do-over in the women’s first slalom run at the Winter Olympics on Wednesday after a course worker got in her way. But on Instagram, she furiously groused that it was “not the same” and said she was “beyond disappointed.”
“I STILL CANNOT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TODAY,” Vukadinova, 20, wrote after she was forced off the course by an Olympics worker who’d left a tool attached to a gate that marks the course. (Watch the video here.)
Her subsequent rerun was “not the same,” she said.
“Not when you have to ski down to the chair lift, go up, go down the start (with my race ski) and start almost immediately. Sure, I may be not a top level skier or fighting for the podium, but I also worked a lot to get here!!! Don’t I at least deserve the same CHANCE like everyone else?”
Vukadinova, who fractured a bone in her hand during Monday’s giant slalom, suggested Tuesday’s bungle “happened for a reason” and expressed gratitude that she hadn’t been injured.
“One thing is to be on course to fix something, other thing is to leave a heavy metal like that on the gate. And on top of that to pretend that it’s completely normal,” she wrote. “I am sad, really sad, but also happy and proud of myself that i was fighting till the end. I will also never get rid of the smile on my face, cause nothing can bring me down.”
See Vukadinova’s Instagram post here:
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
