Olympics-Snowboarding-Medal hope Horgmo breaks collarbone: report

SOCHI, Russia, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Norway snowboarding medal hope Torstein Horgmo has broken his collarbone in a practice run in Sochi and is out of the Olympic Games, Norwegian media reported on Monday. "It was on the first rail element it happened," said team coach Per-Iver Grimsrud. "He was doing a switch hardway, backside 270. He landed wrong on the rail, and then he fell into the stairs to the side." A winner of the X Games in Big Air in 2013, 26-year-old Horgmo was one of Norway's big medal hopes for the Sochi Games before his fall. "He did not remember much afterwards, he had the wind knocked out of him. He will probably feel it tomorrow. We can only hope that it goes well with him," Grimsrud said. The course at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park has already come in for criticism from the athletes, with Irish snowboarder Seamus O'Connor describing it as "pretty dangerous" and urging his competitors to speak up about it. "The riders need to speak up about the conditions," he added. "The rails can't be fixed but they can fix the jumps. (Reporting by Philip O'Connor; Editing by Peter Rutherford)