The United States won gold in the inaugural snowboard cross mixed team event at the Beijing Games on Saturday, with Lindsey Jacobellis edging past Italian Michela Moioli in a nail-biting final race.

Canada, whose female rider had crashed in the final race, caught up to win bronze.

The American team, made up of Jacobellis and 40-year old Nick Baumgartner, were the oldest to compete at Saturday’s mixed team event.

Jacobellis, 36, came out of the gate first in the final but was overtaken by Pyeongchang gold medallist Moioli.

The American kept hot on Moioli’s heels and started to reel her in while the other two boarders fell behind and in the neck-and-neck final stretch Jacobellis came out in front to beat the Italian by 0.2 seconds.

Jacobellis won the United States’ first gold of the Games on Wednesday (February 9) when she took the women’s snowboard cross title — a victory that went some way to making up for a career-defining fall at the 2006 Turin Games

The mixed team event made its Olympics debut at the Beijing Games, but most boarders were already familiar with the course at the Genting Snow Park in Zhangjiakou as they had already raced individual competitions there earlier in the week.

Heavy snow began to fall in Zhangjiakou ahead of Saturday’s final, covering the course with a layer of powdery snow. Air temperatures fell to -11 degree Celsius (12.2°F) and visibility was lower than normal.

Australian Belle Brockhoff was earlier taken off the course by a stretcher after she clipped another boarder and fell during a frenetic quarter-final race.