As Told To - Episode 49: Lindsey Jacobellis

Episode 49: Lindsey Jacobellis

10/17/23 • 85 min

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Lindsey Jacobellis is the most dominant athlete in the history of women’s snowboardcross—a thrilling head-to-head sport that made its Olympic debut at the 2006 games in Torino, when Lindsey also stepped to the Olympic stage for the first time. And yet the inaugural running of the event was nearly her undoing. At 20 years old, Lindsey had a commanding lead heading into the final stretch of the medal round when she grabbed her board on the penultimate jump and was unable to land cleanly, spilling off the course and looking on in despair as her rival, Tanja Frieden of Switzerland, sped past to claim the gold. The world looked on as well, in judgement and disbelief, and Lindsey’s fall would go down as one of the biggest unforced errors in sports—a misstep that allowed her to ultimately write one of the greatest comeback stories in Olympic history.

It also cost her many of her sponsors, and shook her confidence, and in many ways stamped her career before it had really begun, and in her just-published memoir Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall, co-written with podcast host Daniel Paisner, she revisits the anguish and heartbreak that found her on the back of that fall— and followed her around like a black cloud through the next four Olympic cycles, finally leading to her two gold medal runs at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“I’m calling this book Unforgiving because that word has taken on so many meanings for me,” she writes. “It speaks to the single-minded, relentless pursuit that has helped to shape my snowboarding career...but it also reflects the punishing, intolerant treatment I received in the press, and in and around the Olympic and snowboarding communities. And it reminds me that for the longest time I wasn’t able to forgive myself for this one stupid, rash, thoughtless mistake—a mistake that cost me a whole lot more than a simple medal or the chance (for the moment!) to call myself a champion.”

One of the ways Lindsey was finally able to put the fall behind her and reclaim her own narrative was to lean into her many other interests away from the mountain. She moved to California and took up surfing. She became a certified personal trainer and wrote a children’s book, Sochi: A True Story, based on the life-affirming bond she developed with the stray dog she met in the athletes’ village at the Sochi games. And she helped to launch Super Girl Snow Pro, an event series working to showcase the world’s top female pros and provide an inspirational platform for young female athletes.

Join us as we visit with the GOAT of women’s snowboardcross to talk about what it was like to rewrite her story on the snow—and, now, to share that story on the page.

Learn more about Lindsey Jacobellis:

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Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
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Misfits Market (WRITERSBON...

Join us as we visit with the GOAT of women’s snowboardcross to talk about what it was like to rewrite her story on the snow—and, now, to share that story on the page.

Learn more about Lindsey Jacobellis:

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
A Mighty Blaze podcast
The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
Misfits Market (WRITERSBON...

Previous Episode

Episode 48: Jeff Daniels

“Sometimes I’m asked if I’ll ever write a book,” notes actor, playwright and singer-songwriter Jeff Daniels, “and I always answer that I already have. It’s in my songs.”

This is true. But now it’s also true that the stuff of Jeff Daniels’s life is on delightful display in the Audible Originals memoir “Alive and Well Enough”—a collection of stories, musings and songs that invites listeners into the heart and mindset of one of our most versatile performers, offered with grace and good cheer and midwestern soul.

Daniels, the two-time Emmy Award-winning actor and star of such iconic films as “Terms of Endearment,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “Pleasantville,” and “The Squid and the Whale,” recalls being inspired in this effort by the story-laced songs of Steve Goodman and Arlo Guthrie, and, more recently, by Bruce Springsteen’s “Springsteen on Broadway.”

Part podcast, part musical memoir, part bulletins from the frontlines of contemporary storytelling, “Alive and Well Enough” is a wildly entertaining mash-up of Jeff Daniels’s many gifts as a writer and performer, including scenes from some of the author’s original plays, many of which have been staged at The Purple Rose Theatre Company in his hometown of Chelsea, Mich. “[It’s] is the only place where I get to do everything I do,” he says of his new audio project, which he calls “an adventure of an accidental artist who one day looked up and realized he had a sense of humor, a passion for writing, and stories to tell.”

Join us for an insightful, engaging and surprisingly candid conversation on what it means to channel the work of some of our finest playwrights and screenwriters – like Lanford Wilson (“Fourth of July”), Scott Frank (“Godless”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Newsroom” and the Broadway adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird”).

“When you’re inside the writing, it rubs off,” he says.

This is true as well.

Note: This episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast features narrative and song excerpts from Jeff Daniels’s audio memoir “Alive and Well Enough,” presented courtesy of Audible Originals.

Jeff Daniels photo credit: Sam Jones

More from Jeff Daniels:

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
A Mighty Blaze podcast
The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

Next Episode

Episode 50: Dani Shapiro

“I’ve been obsessed with the corrosive power of secrets since my first novel,” reflects the best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro, a writer who has been mining her own secrets since she first put pen to paper.

In a far-ranging, free-wheeling interview with host Daniel Paisner, pulled from a “Book & Author Luncheon” program sponsored by the Friends of the Port Washington (N.Y.) Library in May, 2023, she reflects on her inspirations for her most recent novel Signal Fires, New York Times best-seller and National Jewish Book Award-winner now out in paperback, and for her gripping 2019 memoir Inheritance, also a New York Times best-seller and National Jewish Book Award-winner.

Her fascination with secrets is at the heart of Dani’s wildly popular podcast Family Secrets, now in its ninth season, which invites guests to examine the secrets they choose to carry and the ones they choose to share, and it is at the heart of this conversation. “We all live in aftermath, all the time,” she tells Paisner. “Aftermath is the story of our lives, really. And the question is, What do we do in that aftermath? And how does an incident or a secret that is kept impact us over a long lifetime?”

Join us as Dani Shapiro looks to answer her own question—and in the process, sheds meaningful light on the stuff of all fiction and memoir.

Learn more about Dani Shapiro:

More resources mentioned in the episode:

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