Olympic Snowboarder Karin Ruby dies in Chamonix climbing accident
The world lost of its trailblazing female snowboarders on May 29 to a tragic accident. Former Olympic snowboarding champion Karine Ruby of France fell into a 20m crevasse while climbing Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe, located on the French-Italian border. She was training to become a mountain guide. Lt.-Col. Pierre Bouquin, a police official in Chamonix, said Ruby was roped to other climbers when she fell. Ruby and one other climber, a 38-year-old man from the Paris region, died in the fall, while a 27-year-old man was seriously injured. The group was descending on the glacier du Geant, next to the Tour de Ronde, when the accident took place, Sayssac said. The injured man was evacuated by helicopter and later died in the hospital. France’s best known female snowboarder, the 31-year-old Ruby dominated her sport for almost a decade. She has 65 wins on the world cup circuit, six world championships to her name, and two Olympic medals (gold in 1998, silver in 2002). She retired after the 2006 Olympics, when she was eliminated in the quarter-finals of the snowboardcross event. She was expected to wrap up her mountain guide training in the coming weeks. In a statement Friday, French Prime Minister François Fillon hailed Ruby as an “exceptional sportswoman.” “Karine incarnated the emergence of snowboarding in France,” the statement said. “The people of France will hold on to the memory of her talent and her joie de vivre.” Karine’s funeral took place in the open air outside the church in Chamonix centre at 15:00 on Monday. A sad day for the action sports community and a reminder that the ‘haute montagne’ is a beautiful, yet unpredictably dangerous place.
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