Ayumu Hirano deserved the gold medal twice over in the men’s halfpipe at the Beijing Olympics after earning a perplexingly low score on his second run.
On Friday in Beijing, in the final of the men’s halfpipe, two-time Olympic silver medalist Hirano was vying for his first gold in the event. Hirano was trailing Australian Scotty James’s score of 92.50 heading into his second run, and it seemed as if the Japanese snowboarder put down an all-timer of a run after pulling off a triple cork 1440.
The run seemed to be pretty clean by the eye test, but instead of a huge score, Hirano was only given a 91.75, putting him squarely in second place. The score drew the ire of NBC broadcaster — and former snowboarder himself — Todd Richards, who had an epic rant live on air trashing the judges’ credibility.
Thankfully, for everyone involved, Hirano had an even better run on his third attempt, a run which won him gold after he nailed two triple corks for a score of 96.00.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen an SB Dunk turned into a curling sneaker. Not until Matt Hamilton pulled out the “What The” Paul Rodriguez joints in these winter games.
For those of you who are out of the loop, this is a skateboarding shoe. Paul Rodriguez is one of Nike Skateboarding’s premier athletes. This Dunk serves as an ode to his career and the many sneakers he’s worn through the years. It combines them all into one, which is where the “What The” name comes from with all the colors.
It was one of the coolest shoes to come out in 2021. And here Matt Hamilton is, curling in it. This is so dope, y’all
Matt Hamilton, USA Men's Curling team, mustache, mullet, wearing Paul Rodriguez kicks with Rick &Morty socks may be the most American athlete representing us. GO Team USA! #TeamUSA#Curlingpic.twitter.com/T7ttzVdcVl
First of all, I’m insanely jealous that he has these. It is SUCH an amazing shoe, man. The details. The history. It’s all just *chef’s kiss*. Second, to actually curl in them he had to insert Teflon into the soles. It’s pretty cool. You can turn literally any shoe into a curler.
Here Hamilton is in basketball shoes — the PG 4’s specifically. Just curling. Vibing. It’s so cool.
I wonder if every olympics matt hamilton chooses a character to play. Like maybe in 2026 he shows up with a pipe and a scarf, puffing away as he considers his shot pic.twitter.com/Dxfd38uMI8
No one will be talking about Nathan Chen’s 2018 Olympic struggles again.
Instead, it’s all about his gold medal in 2022 at the Beijing Olympics.
Chen followed an awe-inspiring, world-record short program with a 218.63-point free skate on Wednesday. The Quad King nailed five quadruple jumps in an Elton John-themed program and bested the field by over 22 points.
How do you come back from a disastrous Olympics to do this?
“Just recognizing that within the course of my skating career, I only have a very limited amount of time on the ice and in competition, and especially at the Olympics,” Chen said last week, per USA TODAY Sports. “So if I can’t enjoy it, then what’s the point in doing it?”
On Thursday at the Beijing Olympics, the final of the women’s snowboard halfpipe got underway, with Kim looking to defend her gold medal from 2018. And after one attempt, Kim blew the competition away with some absurd tricks for what might just be the gold medal run.
In Kim’s first run of three on the day, the 21-year-old took to the halfpipe and laid down some absolutely ridiculous tricks. Not only that, Kim hit over 12 feet above the lip of the pipe, just an absurd height that showcases her power and speed as a snowboarder.
Seriously, you have to watch this run, which scored a bonkers 94 from the judges and vaulted her into first place.
CHLOE KIM STOMPS IT IN RUN 1.@ChloeKim's 94.00 puts her in the top spot in the Snowboard Halfpipe Final! #WinterOlympics
Explaining nordic combined and why it isn’t offered to women at the Olympics.
If you’re a fan of the Olympics then this is quite the six-month span for you. First, you were gifted the Tokyo Olympics that took place last summer. Now, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics are about ready to get going in the coming weeks.
The Beijing Games are slated to begin on February 4, and this season’s Olympics include events of both old and new that will combine to make up the 16-day competition. One of the featured events is nordic combined, which you have likely heard of if you’re hip to the Winter Olympics. However, you may recognize it as the only Olympic sport not offered to women.
We take a look at the sport as the Beijing games inch closer.
What do you do when you need snow to train but it’s summer? We found out.
When your sport features snow or ice and you have to train all throughout the year to be an elite athlete with hopes of making the Olympics, what do you do in the summer?
For some sports with indoor venues, it’s a fairly simple solution. However, it’s a little different if athletes need snow-covered mountains or trails to train. But as freestyle skier Winter Vinecki and biathlete Jake Brown, both first-time Olympians, explained recently to For The Win, they have relatively easy options too.
In aerial skiing, athletes launch themselves off massive jumps and execute precise maneuvers, like flips of twists, in the air before trying to stick the landing on an incline. Vinecki said when doing a double, she’s going around 55 kilometers per hour before takeoff, which is about 34 miles per hour.
To practice her moves in the summer — and to learn new ones in a safer environment — Vinecki said she and the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team rely on an aerials pool at the Utah Olympic Park, training there from about May to October.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUTP1WrJTf2/
“All summer long, the train on water ramps into a pool,” Vinecki, a 23 year old from Gaylord, Michigan, said. “So it has our jumps that go into a pool that we land it, and it has a bubble system so it softens the landing and makes it so he can see where we’re going to land easier. So [it] helps us see while we’re flipping through the air.
“And we do hundreds and hundreds on water, climbing up to the top of the metal stairs after every jump in all of our wet gear. And so this is how we practice in a little bit safer environment so that we can do new tricks.”
Climbing up stairs in wet skiing gear over and over sounds almost as challenging as the aerials these skiers attempt. But they’re not actually wearing all the same equipment compared with skiing on snow, Vinecki explained.
They’re not wearing their snow pants or jackets; they’re wearing wetsuits “and even dry suits when it’s very early season in May when the water’s still 48 degrees and then in October, sometimes, we’ve had snow when we’re so water ramping,” she said. But the rest is fairly similar to what you get on snow.
“We have our normal boots, we have our helmets, mouthguard and our skis are very similar,” Vinecki continued. “The main difference is that it has holes cut into our skis, so that softens the impact. And so, obviously, the skis we use are different, but they’re the same brand and everything and give us the same feel.”
Winter Vinecki at Utah Olympic Park (@usskiteam // Christian Raguse)
Although practicing aerials in a pool is safer, especially when learning new tricks, messing up doesn’t exactly feel like falling on a bed of clouds.
“It doesn’t feel good if you still land on your stomach or back, but it’s at least more safe then learning on snow,” Vinecki added laughing.
For other types of skiers, like cross-country skiers, biathletes (cross-country skiing plus target shooting with rifles) or nordic combined athletes (cross-country skiing plus ski jumping), the summer training solution comes with wheels.
Specifically, roller skis. Like rollerblades but with the feel of cross-country skis.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTLOLMaMGNO/
“They’re essentially a kind of built up shaft of ski,” Brown, a 29-year-old biathlete from St. Paul, Minnesota, said.
“Different companies make them out of different things. The most common ones are aluminum. The ones that we use are made by a Finnish company called Marwe that has a patented version that’s actually a honeycomb core — just like a cross country ski is made out of — that’s wrapped in fiberglass.”
This is the primary method for cross-country skiers training in the summer, from about May to November, Brown said. He lives in an athlete house at Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Vermont, and the property includes a biathlon range and a roller ski loop with a paved path through the woods like in cross-country skiing trails.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2e4mQmJ-Iy/?hl=en
And while roller skiing is not exactly the same as training on snow, it gets the job done.
“It’s hard to learn to ski on roller skis and then translate that to snow,” he continued. “But if you’re used to skiing on snow, the roller skis are a great training tool. And we can ski with pretty much identical technique to snow on roller skis, so we’re training all the same muscle groups. …
“We do all our intervals and everything on roller skis [and] distance train just like we would on snow.”
Lindsey Jacobellis’s heartbreaking 16-year wait for an Olympic snowboardcross gold medal is over after the Turin mistake in 2006.
The first gold medal for the United States at the 2022 Beijing Olympics is a very special one.
Lindsey Jacobellis was forever known for having a humongous lead in the 2006 Turin Olympics finals in snowboardcross before trying a trick out before the finish line and crashing. She got a silver that year, and since then? She didn’t get into the medal round in the 2010 and 2014 Games.
In 2018? She finished in fourth.
Not this time. She won gold in Beijing, at 36 years old, making her the oldest snowboarder ever to medal. What a story. No more talk of that mistake in 2006. Now, she’s forever a gold medalist.
The sports world is sending its best to Mikaela Shiffrin.
Mikaela Shiffrin has shockingly skied out of her second event at the Beijing Olympics, the women’s slalom.
On Wednesday morning in Beijing, Shiffrin had just started her slalom run when she was disqualified after missing a gate merely five seconds in. On Monday, Shiffrin was disqualified from her giant slalom run after she wiped out at the top of the course. Shiffrin was favored in both events, as she was the reigning gold medalist in the giant slalom from 2018.
Both disqualifications are unusual from Shiffrin, who has been known as a pretty mistake-free skier in her career. These Olympics are the first that Shiffrin is without her late father, a loss that she has stated is still pretty “painful” nearly two years later.
Shiffrin will be participating in three more events in the Beijing Olympics — women’s downhill and the two women’s combined events — and will still have the chance to claim a fourth Olympic medal (or more) in her career.
The sports world has since rallied around Shiffrin, who sat devastated at the side of the course after her disqualification. Sports fans also were left fuming with NBC’s coverage of Shiffrin’s disqualification, as the broadcast spent minutes lingering on shots of her sitting on the course in disbelief.
When most people think of Beijing, it’s hard to imagine “Winter Sports Destination” crossing anyone’s mind. And that’s because the Chinese capital rarely has significant snowfall, especially in the dry month of February where average temperatures are around 40 degrees.
So, why would Beijing get awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics? That’s a great question and has a lot to do with Oslo withdrawing from consideration. But let’s get back to the weather.
The average February snowfall for Beijing is less than an inch, so many of the outdoor events will take place a couple hours away from Beijing in Zhangjiakou. And the snow you’ll see on those mountains will be almost entirely artificial snow.
Aesthetically, it makes for an odd scene at a Winter Games: Ski events taking place with a backdrop of barren, dry mountains. But fake snow has its environmental concerns as well, via Quartz:
The climate in Zhangjiakou, 100 miles from Beijing, is cold, but dry. For the last four decades it has averaged a scant 7.9 mm of precipitation each winter. China’s bid for the Winter Olympics had always hinged on an army of snow machines.
China’s bid estimated that they would need 49 million gallons of water to blanket the Olympic slopes in snow. However, a geographer interviewed by Bloomberg, estimated that the country could divert as much as 2 million cubic meters (528 million gallons) of water to snow-making, further straining one of the most water-stressed regions in the country.
Fake snow can often be icier than natural snowfall, as well, so we’ll have to see if the difference noticeably impacts the competition.
Physics has no hold over Eileen Gu, I am convinced.
On Monday, in the final of the Women’s Freeski Big Air event at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Gu landed one of the more absolutely bonkers tricks at a competition. Heading into her third run of the final, needing a big trick to win gold with French skiier Tess Ledeux ahead of her, Gu laid it all out on the slope.
After landing a 1440 (four complete rotations) on her first run, Gu went full throttle with a double cork 1620 (four and a half rotations) for her third and final run, securing the gold in the process.
What an absolute monster of a trick. Not only that, this was the first 1620 Gu has landed in her career at just 18-years-old. The only other woman to land one in competition? Ledeux, who Gu passed for the gold with this trick that scored 94.50.
Gu is an American citizen, but decided to compete for China to represent her mother’s home country for these Beijing Games. Talk about a lovely — and incredibly epic — moment for Gu and her home Chinese fans!
