Janice Spitery, 29, who made a mistake on the first glide of the first Winter Olympics, almost cried. While waiting for the score, she touched her pocket, and there was a bean bun that had not been eaten in the morning, she took a bite and smiled at the camera.
On February 9, Beijing time, the Beijing Winter Olympics snowboarding women's U-shaped track skills ended the qualification competition, Malta's Spitery ranked 21st and missed the final. But after the game, the cute move made her athletes from an island nation of half a million people soar in interest. When you first get to know her, you will find that she has a lot of labels: snowboard U-shaped pool athlete, the only athlete of the Malta delegation at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the flag bearer girl with colorful hair at the opening ceremony...
Her solo trip to the Winter Olympics was far more wonderful than these labels.
The girl who lives in the motorhome
For Janice, the hardest thing about snowboarding is the economic problem, and over the years her training fund has been mostly self-funded, and some of it has been financially supported by the Olympic Solidarity Fund (a project that helps countries establish national sports programs). In order to offset the consumption of rent, Janice simply moved into a motorhome and saved the money for training. Wherever she trains, the car drives.
When she first started living in a motorhome, she had a lot of problems to solve. Because there was no heating in the car, toothpaste and contact lenses would freeze, and she needed to use her credit card to scrape the frost off the windshield every morning, so in order to save money on electricity, she learned to put food directly outdoors for natural refrigeration. In 2020, Janice upgraded her motorhome to a van equipped with a refrigerator and a stove for cooking, but still didn't have heating when she slept, and she didn't want to make the car too conspicuous because of the engine or the large equipment such as the air conditioner: "I'm a 5'4 girl, and I don't want people to know that someone is sleeping in this car. ”
Janice set up a separate "caravan life" section on her social media, in the video, all her life is in this car, every morning the mirror is hung on the skylight, using natural light makeup, get up and fold the bed directly into a sofa, eat breakfast after a simple wash, grab the skateboard in the car and go out to train.
Instead of buying tickets for last summer's training session, Janice carried her gear and hiked a mile a day. She spends all the money she saves on coaching courses. On the snowy mountain, Jenny skated on a skateboard and flew around the sky, as if the world was the only one she and snowboarding.
29-year-old Olympic rookie
Janice's father was born in Malta, her grandfather came to the United States after World War II, and Janice grew up in San Francisco as a Maltese American. Janice wasn't the chosen one, she didn't start snowboarding until she was 18 years old, moving to the mountains to train her family. At first her wish was simple, she just fell in love with the sport, she wanted to travel the world with skateboarding, and the idea of participating in the Olympics never came to her mind. Until 10 years ago, a friend who was training together accidentally said to her: "Why don't you represent Malta in the Olympic Games?" ”
Since then, putting Malta on the Olympic snowboard map has been Janice's dream. But the idea was crazy at the time, and Janice was even subjected to online violence. Several of the boys she practiced skiing with wrote tirades about her online, saying that she was daydreaming of arrogance and ignorance, and that sooner or later she would give up snowboarding. Eleven years later, Janice, as the first Maltese Winter Olympics athlete, stood on the U-shaped pool of snowboarding at the Beijing Winter Olympics. And those boys at that time had long given up snowboarding.
Six months before the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, Janice tore her Achilles tendon and meniscus at a World Cup match in New Zealand. In February 2018, on the eve of the Winter Olympics, the Maltese delegation had a candidate for the Winter Olympics for the first time, and within 48 hours of that news, Janice refreshed the page every five minutes, hoping that any delegation would give up a place. But she didn't wait in the end.
Four years later, on Feb. 2, Janice uploaded a video on social media titled: My Official Announcement of the 2022 Beijing Olympics! In the video, she almost burst into tears of joy.
Colorful hair, adventure in life
Four years ago, Janice began to share her journey to the PyeongChang Olympics and her experience of traveling around the world online, and has posted more than 200 videos and has nearly 40,000 followers.
Flip through Janice's social media and you won't be attracted to her hair color, green, blue, purple, rainbow... Although the hair color is different, what has not changed is her cheerful smile. This combination of pink and blue, which she dyed herself the day before the opening ceremony, likes to take dyes of various colors and combine them at will to give creativity to her hair.
In Janice's personal introduction, she wrote such a sentence: Life is an adventure. Two jumps in the qualifiers, the first jump error, the second jump after the 21st place, missed the final, 29-year-old Janice's first Olympic journey is over, but her adventure life continues, she will return to her motorhome, will also hike and train, will also travel the world with skateboarding, she will always be Malta's first Winter Olympic athlete.
When she stood alone on the Winter Olympics, she had already won.
(Text/Official website of Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee)