Maëlle Ricker

Maëlle Danica Ricker is a retired Canadian snowboarder who specialised in snowboard cross. She was born on 2 December 1978, grew up in North Vancouver and West Vancouver, British Columbia, and lives in Squamish. She first competed in the FIS Snowboard World Cup in the 1996 to 1997 season and made her Olympic debut in the halfpipe at Nagano in 1998, where she finished fifth. A knee injury kept her out of the 2002 Games, and at Turin in 2006 she was 23rd in the halfpipe and fourth in snowboard cross after a heavy crash. At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver she won the snowboard cross gold medal, the first Canadian woman to win an Olympic gold on home soil. She was also the 2013 world champion, a two time Winter X Games champion, and the overall World Cup champion in the 2007 to 2008 season. The account here rests on her English Wikipedia article, with the Olympedia athlete page as a second source.