Maëlle Ricker
Maëlle Ricker receives her gold medal at the 2010 Olympic medal ceremony.
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| Born |
December 2, 1978 North Vancouver, British Columbia |
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| Height | 1.70 m (5 ft 7 in) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | 63 kg (139 lb; 9.9 st) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Website | www.maellericker.ca/ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Country |
 Canada
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| Sport | Snowboard cross | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Maëlle Danica Ricker (/maɪˈɛl/; born December 2, 1978) is a retired Canadian snowboarder, who specialised in snowboard cross. She won an Olympic gold medal in the snowboard cross event at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, to become the first Canadian woman to win a gold medal on home soil at the Olympics. She is also the 2013 World Champion and two-time Winter X Games Champion (1999, 2006).
Ricker was born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, and resides in Squamish, British Columbia. As a young girl Ricker had two dreams: to compete competitively in snowboarding, and to compete in snowboarding at the Winter Olympics, despite the fact that Snowboarding was not an Olympic sport at the time. She first competed in the FIS Snowboard World Cup during the 1996–97 season, twice standing on the podium in her rookie season. She competed at her first Olympics in 1998 in Nagano where only parallel giant slalom and halfpipe were Olympic snowboard events. Ricker competed in the halfpipe event placing fifth. After Nagano, Ricker began competing in multiple snowboard disciplines, competing in both the halfpipe and in the newer sport of boarder cross. She won her first World Cup gold in the discipline of snowboard cross later that year in 1998. She was forced to skip the 2002 Winter Olympics because of injury. At the 2006 Winter Olympics she placed 23rd in Women's halfpipe and 4th in the Women's Snowboard Cross event. She crashed hard in the race, and was hospitalized with a minor concussion. Ricker later said that she did not remember her crash, and that finishing fourth in 2006 was like "seeing the love of your life on the subway but never getting to meet them."
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