At NYT, "American Snowboarder Wins First Gold of Games":
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — The snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg is not someone to hold big ambitions or make grand plans. Before winning a qualifying event last month that helped send him to the Winter Olympics in slopestyle, he had not won a snowboarding competition since he was 11.I love this guy, heh.
“A megadrought,” he called it.
And when he stood at the top of the course at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday, he was not sure which tricks he would attempt. The one that mattered was one he had never attempted.
“I just kind of make things up,” he explained.
It was just another way that Kotsenburg, 20, is playfully different than most of his competitors, who have spent all winter perfecting runs that they imagined for months. And now Kotsenburg, from Park City, Utah, stands apart from the rest for the most unexpected of reasons. He has a gold medal, the first of these Games and the first in the debut of snowboard slopestyle in the Olympics.
His victory was not just an underdog tale. It sparked discussions, both among aggrieved competitors and in the wide world of snowboarding, about how such competitions should be judged.
Several athletes landed triple corks, a gyroscopic series of twists and flips, considered the must-do trick to elevate above the field. The favorite, Mark McMorris of Canada, landed two in his run. They were the types of runs that most predicted would win the event, but McMorris settled for a bronze medal. Staale Sandbech of Norway won silver.
Kotsenburg, a throwback in both style and vocabulary — rarely does a sentence go by without a “rad,” a “stoked” or a “sick,” and sometimes there is more than one — performed no such feats of conformity.
Slopestyle, long considered the purer, mellower cousin of the more -famous halfpipe, features a mix of rails to slide down and three large jumps to launch upward. Athletes are judged by the “overall impression” they make to the six judges, looking for an undefined combination of revolutions and style.
The vagueness is intended to spur creativity. And Kotsenburg, more than anyone, toted a unique style, combining old-school spins with newly invented contortions and grabs, sometimes with two hands.
Among his tricks was one performed while sliding down a steep rail near the top of the course, leaning back on two hands. Most call it a full layback. Kotsenburg calls it a stony surfer. A jump featured a two-handed grab nicknamed Holy Crail.
But the gold-winning stunt came at the end, on the last of three large jumps. Kotsenburg performed a 1620 Japan, four-and-a-half revolutions while grabbing the board in front of his front foot and arching his back like someone playing Twister on a flying saucer.
No one else did it. It is rarely seen. But Kotsenburg decided to try it, he said, about three minutes before his run.
“I had never, ever tried that trick before in my life,” he said.
Still more at the link.
And at London's Daily Mail, "'Wow I just won the Olympics': American Sage Kotsenburg wins first Sochi gold medal in Men's Slopestyle."
0 comments:
Post a Comment