LIVIGNO, Italy — Chinese snowboarder Liu Jiayu took a scary fall in Olympic halfpipe qualifying Wednesday and had to be carried off on a stretcher after landing hard on her left arm and shoulder, slamming her face and stomach to the ground then bending backward and somersaulting through the bottom of the pipe.
There was no immediate word from the Chinese team on Liu’s status.
The fall, which came after the 33-year-old Liu caught an edge while landing her final jump, stopped action on the halfpipe for about 10 minutes while medical personnel attended to her.
Liu was trying to finish her second and final run of qualifying with a 900-degree spin.
The board slammed flat onto the transition part of the pipe but quickly caught an edge as it approached the flat part, slamming Liu violently forward while her legs and board snapped over her back — a wreck known in snowboarding parlance as a “Scorpion.”
American Chloe Kim finished first in qualifying and was among 12 moving on to Thursday night’s final.
