But, having reached the grand old snowboarding age of 33, there was a suspicion that slopestyle’s inclusion in the Olympic Games had come too late in Jones’s career, especially after she failed to qualify automatically from Thursday’s preliminary round and only narrowly scraped through the semi-finals. When it came to the final, she was giving away six years to her next oldest rival. But Jones’s years of experience of competing at the top of her sport ultimately proved her greatest weapon. While many of her younger rivals came to grief for pushing the degree of difficulty of their tricks too far, Jones and her coach decided to play things safe on her second run and concentrate on getting to the bottom without errors, having observed how even the slightest technical infringement was being punished by the judges. They were proved correct.