NBC crowned wrong winner as snowboarder on borrowed skis spoiled the party for Lindsey Vonn

The cameras had already turned away.

In the finish area of the Jeongseon Alpine Centre, the narrative of the 2018 PyeongChang Super-G was already being etched into the history books.

Getty

Anna Veith, the Austrian star and defending champion, was doing interviews, her face lit with the relief of a woman who had just secured Olympic gold.

NBC followed the standard script for alpine skiing: once the top 20 ranked athletes had finished, the medals were essentially engraved.

After Veith finished, NBC play-by-play announcer Dan Hicks famously declared, ‘Anna Veith still can’t believe it: she’s a gold medalist again’.

He pronounced her the winner no fewer than five times.

Believing the race was over, NBC cut away from the mountain entirely, switching to live coverage of men’s figure skating.

Millions of Americans were watching Adam Rippon on the ice when a ‘Breaking News’ update flashed across the screen. NBC had to awkwardly jump back to the slopes to explain that a snowboarder in bib 26 had just ‘interrupted’ their gold medal ceremony.

For many U.S. viewers, the Super-G was supposed to be Lindsey Vonn’s triumphant return to the Olympic podium after missing the 2014 Games due to injury.

Vonn, wearing bib #1, was skiing a blistering, medal-worthy run until a massive mistake on the final turn, swinging wide and nearly missing a gate, cost her 0.38 seconds.

That error dropped her to a tie for 6th. Had she skied a clean finish, she almost certainly would have been on the podium.

The story, it seemed, was over.

Getty

Getty

Then, wearing bib number 26, a “snowboarder” pushed out of the starting gate.

What followed wasn’t just a race; it was one of the most shocking moments in Olympics history.

Ester Ledecka of the Czech Republic, who had spent the bulk of her season on a single board, sliced through the deteriorating snow on a borrowed pair of skis. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She definitely wasn’t supposed to be fast.

Ledecka was a world-class athlete, yes, but in the world of alpine skiing, she was an interloper—a hobbyist compared to the specialists.

Because she didn’t have the ranking to command a custom-tuned fleet of gear, she was racing on a pair of “broken-in” Atomic skis from a shared equipment pool, previously used by Mikaela Shiffrin’s team.

As she plummeted down the mountain, the timing splits began to glow green. The commentators’ voices rose from dismissal to confusion, then to pure, unadulterated shock. When she crossed the finish line, the scoreboard flashed a number that made no sense: -0.01.

Getty

She had beaten Veith by a hundredth of a second—the blink of an eye.

But the most iconic moment of the 2018 Games wasn’t the run itself; it was the aftermath.

Ledecka didn’t celebrate. She didn’t pump her fists or scream. She stood frozen in the finish corral, staring at the clock with a look of vacant suspicion.

For nearly a minute, she remained motionless, convinced that the timing system had malfunctioned and was about to ‘correct’ itself. It took a cameraman leaning in to tell her, “No, you are the winner,” for the reality to sink in.

Even the post-race press conference felt like a fever dream. Ledecka refused to take off her ski goggles, famously telling the world’s media that she hadn’t put on any makeup because she never expected to be standing on a podium.

Seven days later, the “accidental” alpine champion returned to her natural habitat. Swapping two planks for one, she dominated the Parallel Giant Slalom in snowboarding, winning her second gold medal of the week.

In doing so, Ledecka achieved what many thought was physiologically and logistically impossible. She became the first woman to win gold in two different sports at a single Winter Games.

She didn’t just break the record; she broke the very idea of specialization.

To this day, the story of PyeongChang 2018 isn’t just about a gold medal. It’s about the girl who showed up to a ski race on borrowed gear, forgot to take her goggles off, and accidentally became one of the greatest multi-sport athletes on earth.

Perhaps the most lasting image of that week wasn’t the podium or the medals, but a young woman refusing to take off her goggles at a press conference because she hadn’t planned on being famous that day.

It was a refreshing moment of accidental greatness.

Ledecka didn’t set out to be a pioneer or a history-maker; she just wanted to go fast.

As it turns out, going fast, regardless of how many boards are under your feet, is a universal language that the history books understand perfectly.