Eileen Gu ends unprecedented Olympic debut with halfpipe gold
Feb 18, 2022·Freeski Park & Pipe
One of the most anticipated events of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games for the host nation of China and freeski fans around the world took to the halfpipe at Genting Snow Park on Friday, where China’s own Eileen Gu capped off her star-making Olympic debut with another historic performance by taking the victory for her third medal of these Games.
With her gold medals in halfpipe and big air, along with her silver in slopestyle, Gu’s Beijing 2022 performance is the single most successful single-Games effort in Freestyle history, and in just over two weeks of action she has placed herself amongst names like Kari Traa (NOR), Mikael Kingsbury (CAN), Conny Kissling (SUI) and Edgar Grospiron (FRA) - which is to say, some of the very best to ever do it.
There’s more than that, though, and we’ve got the breakdown:
At 18 years, 168 days, Gu is now the youngest athlete to win three individual medals at the Olympic Winter Games.
With her victory on Friday, Gu becomes the youngest Olympic medallist in women’s freeski halfpipe.
Gu is the third athlete to win multiple gold medals in freestyle skiing at the Olympic Winter Games after Alexandre Bilodeau (CAN) and David Wise (USA), who both also have two. However, she’s the first to achieve this feat in a single Games.
Gu also becomes the first freestyle skier to win three medals at a single Olympic Winter Games, and now sits in a tie with multiple athletes atop the all-time Olympic podium rankings for freestyle skiing.
Gu joins Wise as the only freeskiers to win the crystal globe, World Championships gold, X Games, and Olympic gold in a single event, with both athletes achieving this career ‘grand slam’ in halfpipe.
Gu is the first reigning world champion to claim Olympic gold in halfpipe competition.
Either one of Gu’s first two runs would have been enough to earn her the win on Friday, but her second was the standout.
There she started things off with a right corked 900 Buick, straight into a left corked 900 Japan, followed by a right 720 lead tail grab, then a switch left 360 Japan, before finishing things off big and stylish on her last two hits with a left alley-oop flatspin 540 mute and then a right alley-oop flatspin 540 safety for a massive score of 95.25 and an emphatic victory.
After seeing the rest of the field come down for their third runs without being able to best her score, Gu allowed herself a moment we hadn’t seen from the 18-year-old up to this point in her career, as instead of looking to push the boundaries once again she decided that, after over two-weeks of constant skiing and dealing with the pressure of being the ‘face of the Games,’ she opted for a casual, straight-air victory lap - including a couple classic cossacks.
"I've never taken a victory lap before,” Gu said after the flower ceremony at the base of the halfpipe, “I'm always saying, 'I want to push harder, I want to show that I can do more’. And today, it kind of just felt like this coming-together moment because it's my last event at the Olympics.
"I put so much work into this, and to just feel like it was all worth it - all those little moments, the time I put in, in the gym after shooting a fashion editorial for eight to 10 hours, when I ran a half-marathon every week over the summer, when I pushed myself to be the first person in practice and the last person to leave. Just all those little moments I feel like added up and it was just this great realisation that it was all worth it and that it was all real.
"I was very emotional at the top and I chose to do a victory lap because I felt like for the first time I really deserved it, and I really earned it. It was just this great period, punctuation on this amazing journey up until this Olympics.”
Second place and the silver medal went to Canada’s Cassie Sharpe, winner of gold at PyeongChang 2018.
Sharpe spent much of the intervening years since PyeongChang struggling with various injuries and set-backs, rarely finding herself going toe-to-tie with Gu as the Chinese skier made her rapid ascent to the top of the freeski world.
Sharpe’s most recent injury was a was a ruptured ACL ligament that she underwent surgery for one year ago, and her battle to recover from that and regain her outstanding form was an arduous one.
“Exactly a year ago I had reconstructive ACL knee surgery in which they fractured my femur (as part of the surgery). It was just a crazy experience to go through that, and the first three, four months after surgery I didn't know if I would make it here.
"Being able to flip it around and get on snow just under four months ago and make it to the Games and get a podium - I'm extremely proud and pretty satisfied with my performance. I left it all on the table and (am) just stoked to be here.”
Sharpe won her silver with an outstanding third run that began with a right corked 900 safety, into a left corked 900 tail, and then a right corked 1080, a switch right 360 mute, a right flare safety, and finally a left 1080 tindy to finish things off for a score of 90.75.
Rounding out the podium in third place was Sharpe’s Canadian teammate Rachael Karker, as the 24-year-old walked away with some Olympic hardware in her first Games appearance.
Karker’s hard-charging first run started out with a big left flair mute, into a right corked 900 Japan, then a left corked 900 Japan, a right flair safety, left corked 720 safety, and finally a switch left alley-oop 540 for a final score of 87.75 and the bronze medal.
"It was good,” Karker said of her day in the pipe, “We got some fresh snow last night and it was pretty windy, so that was a little harder to deal with than yesterday's weather. But I'm super happy with being able to push through that and still ski pretty well."
Just back of Karker in fourth place was Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru - one of the medal favourites pre-competition, who skied cleanly and technically but lacked some of the amplitude and off-axis rotations exhibited by the three women on the podium.
With women’s halfpipe in the books, the final event of freestyle and freeskiing competition at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games will be the men’s pipe competition, with the 12 best in the world set to drop in at 9:30 local time on Saturday.
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