Intraseasonal wind bursts in the tropical Pacific are believed to affect the evolution and diversity of El Nino events. In particular, the occurrence of two strong westerly wind bursts (WWBs) in early 2014 apparently pushed the ocean-atmosphere system toward a moderate to strong El Nino-potentially an extreme event according to some climate models. However, the event's progression quickly stalled, and the warming remained very weak throughout the year. Here, we find that the occurrence of an unusually strong basin-wide easterly wind burst (EWB) in June was a key factor that impeded the El Nino development. It was shortly after this EWB that all major Nino indices fell rapidly to near-normal values; a modest growth resumed only later in the year. The easterly burst and the weakness of subsequent WWBs resulted in the persistence of two separate warming centers in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, suppressing the positive Bjerknes feedback critical for El Nino. Experiments with a climate model with superimposed wind bursts support these conclusions, pointing to inherent limits in El Nino predictability. Furthermore, we show that the spatial structure of the easterly burst matches that of the observed decadal trend in wind stress in the tropical Pacific, suggesting potential links between intraseasonal wind bursts and decadal climate variations.