BEIJING — “Super-proud” snowboarder Zoi
Sadowski Synnott made history for New Zealand after winning their first-ever
Winter Olympics gold medal on Sunday but bad weather played havoc with the
eagerly anticipated men’s downhill skiing.
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Seven golds were up for grabs on the second full day
of competition in the Chinese capital, as the sports took center stage after a
build-up overshadowed by
COVID-19 and rights concerns.
Seven became six when the main event of the day, the
men’s downhill — one of the most closely watched events at the Winter Olympics
— was postponed because of gusty winds and will now take place on Monday
instead.
Wind also caused the cancellation of Saturday’s
third and final training run, albeit after three racers had come down the
“Rock” course in Yanqing, notably hot favorite Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of
Norway.
There was no such trouble for the 20-year-old
Sadowski Synnott, who held her nerve under brilliant blue skies to take the
women’s snowboard slopestyle title with the last run of the competition and
make history.
“Honestly it’s absolute disbelief but it probably
means more to me to win
New Zealand’s first Winter Olympic gold,” said Sadowski
Synnott, who was born in Sydney and moved to New Zealand when she was six.
“It makes me super proud to be a Kiwi.”
Sadowski Synnott, who spent COVID-19 lockdown back
in New Zealand jumping on a trampoline to help her aerial awareness, launched
into a massive jump with her final trick to earn a winning score of 92.88.
She was mobbed at the finish by American Julia
Marino, who was relegated into silver with 87.68, and bronze medallist Tess
Coady of Australia.
New Zealand had previously won one silver and two
bronze medals at the Winter Olympics — including a third-place finish for
Sadowski Synnott in the Big Air competition at the 2018
Pyeongchang Games.
Skating for grandma
Other golds on offer Sunday
were in cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, luge, ski jumping, and speed
skating.
Saturday had belonged to Norwegian cross-country
skier Therese Johaug — who missed the 2018 Games because of a doping suspension
— after she won the first gold of the Games.
China also won their first gold in Beijing, the
hosts’ quartet emerging from the thrills and spills of the short track speed
skating mixed relay on the event’s chaotic debut.
In the figure skating team event, 15-year-old
Russian Kamila Valieva topped the scores in the women’s short program to underline
her status as a potential winner of the high-quality individual event next
week.
“I’m skating for my grandmother who passed away so I
think it was that feeling got me,” she said, having performed to Kirill
Richter’s “In Memoriam”.
The Games are taking place in a vast “closed loop”
designed to thwart the coronavirus.
There have been more than 363 positive cases in the
bubble since January 23, according to latest official figures, among them an
unknown number of competitors.
The nearly 3,000 athletes are cocooned along with
tens of thousands of volunteers, support staff, and journalists and everyone
inside the bubble must wear face masks and take daily
COVID-19 tests.
The
US has led a diplomatic boycott of some Western nations,
but their athletes are still competing.
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