Poor Lindsey. She had to put up with hackneyed criticism of her misguided hot-dogging for four years only to fall short once again at the Winter Games.

By now you’ve all heard this story at length and probably watched Jenna Bush (of all people) inexplicably try to interview Lindsey after she clipped that gate yesterday. We know how she feels, which is not to say we’re elite level athletes (although I did go to the gym last night where some bitch on the treadmill in front of me switched from Olympics coverage to local Fox news), rather, she’s behaving in a way very near and dear to our hearts.

Lindsey Jacobellis is acting out as many scenes from RAD as she can. We’ll explain.

Time travel back to four years ago. Lindsey is the best snowboardcross racer in the world and has the race well in hand. Rather than cruising to any easy victory, her hubris gets the better of her and she attempts an ill-informed method air to celebrate prematurely. Naturally, she crashes hard and ends up with a miserable silver medal. Who does that?

Bart Taylor, that’s who. In the midst of winning Helltrack handily, Taylor stops midway through and invites Cru Jones to battle one-on-one. Whereas he could have rocked the admittedly difficult track with a large cushion, his arrogance took hold and Taylor had to showboat against his chief rival. Naturally, the stalwart and heroic Cru Jones outraced Taylor, and Taylor ended up with a lousy second place.

Sadly for Taylor, or perhaps more sadly for us considering we’ve yet to receive a sequel, he never got a chance at redemption. Although I like to think he and Cru end up like Rocky and Apollo at the end of Rocky III in some dark racetrack somewhere battling each other just to see who’s the best where Taylor says, “You beat me by one second – one second – Jones, and that’s very hard for a man of my intelligence to handle.”

Lindsey Jacobellis, however, did get a shot at redemption this year in her own version of Helltrack. And the snowboardcross track is basically just Helltrack on snow – a fast, grueling course that seems to eat riders alive and rewards only the best, and most creative riders. What happens this year? Lindsey makes like Hollywood Mike Miranda and biffs it on one of the gates. Mike Miranda failed to make the cliffhanger jump, Lindsey Jacobellis missed a gate and lost out on a dream once again.

We look forward to four years from now when Lindsey can act out the Cru Jones scenario, and hopefully by then, either RAD will be on DVD or I will have found my VHS copy of it. Until then, let’s just pretend the less strained, and more obvious Lindsey Jacobellis metaphor of Dan Jansen falling in two Olympics speed skating events leading to his eventual victory at his 3rd Olympics never existed, okay?

Instead, let’s all lament that both Courtney Love and Dee Snider are too old to play Lindsey in a movie.

edagger@crujonessociety.com