Alex Corridor and Nick Goepper Take Gold and Silver in Males’s Slopestyle Snowboarding
Three Individuals seemed to crowd the medal stand on the males’s freestyle snowboarding slopestyle occasion, hoping {that a} European-centric discipline wouldn’t disrupt these plans.
Two of them did it: Alex Corridor gained gold and Nick Goepper took silver on one other sunny, below-zero day at Genting Snow Park. Jesper Tjader of Sweden gained bronze.
In a contest the place solely a skier’s greatest rating counted, Corridor set a excessive bar early with a 90.01 rating on the primary of three runs. When he landed his final bounce, his hoot may very well be heard all through the end space.
Everybody else spent the morning attempting to make extra noise. Goepper got here closest, on his second run, scoring 86.48.
All proper,” he stated when the rating popped up. “I’ll take it.”
Every of the Individuals within the last arrived with excessive hopes and a stirring story. Goepper, 27, was trying to full a full rainbow of medals, having gained a bronze in 2014 and a silver in 2018. He has battled alcohol abuse and melancholy, opening up about his struggles after his 2018 efficiency in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
In an interview final month, Goepper stated that he was glad that other Olympians seem increasingly willing to discuss their mental health.
Colby Stevenson, 24, was in a near-fatal automobile accident in 2016, late at evening on a rural street in Idaho. He spent days in a coma, however recovered to return to the worldwide circuit a few yr later. At these Olympics, he gained a silver medal in large air, however thought that slopestyle offered a greater likelihood to medal.
Stevenson completed seventh. “Gave it every thing I had,” he stated after his last run.
The day belonged to Corridor. The 23-year-old was born in Alaska however grew up principally in Switzerland, the son of professors on the College of Zurich. He didn’t have teaching till he was 16, when he was invited by the U.S. freeski workforce to coach in Utah. For a time, he thought-about competing for Italy, the place his mom is from.
He was sixteenth in slopestyle on the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, simply as his profession was taking off. He gained a World Cup occasion that yr and the X Video games in 2019. He was third ultimately yr’s world championships.
“You’ll see him doing an entire bunch of faucets and nostril butters and artistic methods to make the most of the course,” U.S. freeski coach Dave Euler stated of Corridor in December. “He’s a really inventive course person.”
The competition was the ultimate exhibiting for the slopestyle course, a standout venue — however a brief one, manufactured from snow — designed to appear like a piece of the close by Nice Wall.
Its mixture of rails, obstacles and jumps vexed among the world’s greatest snowboarders and freeskiers, but in addition created some memorable moments and stellar Olympic champions from around the globe.
Earlier than Wednesday’s last occasion, the 9 medals awarded in slopestyle had gone to athletes from seven totally different international locations.
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott of New Zealand and Max Parrot of Canada gained in snowboarding. Mathilde Gremaud of Switzerland narrowly beat China’s Eileen Gu within the girls’s model of the freeskiing occasion on Tuesday.