Winter Olympics: Canada’s Parrot wins men’s snowboard slopestyle; Germany, Slovenia, China bag gold medals

Chongli (China):  Max Parrot of Canada beat Chinese favourite Su Yiming to win the gold in the men’s snowboard slopestyle at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics here on Monday. Despite missing out on the gold medal, 17-year-old Su has become the first Chinese male snowboarder to reach the Olympic podium.

PyeongChang 2018 Olympic silver medallist Parrot secured the victory with 90.96 points on his second run, where he had a smooth performance along every section of the course, and landed a triple cork 1620 in both his fourth and sixth tricks.

“This is so incredibly special, especially with the run I did today. It’s the biggest run I’ve done in my entire career,” said Parrot. “I’ve never done two triples in a row in a run, with that difficulty as well, and everything was so clean. I am extremely proud of myself and to take gold on that run means so much for me.”

Su scored his medal-winning 88.70 points in his second of three runs, by performing a triple cork 1800 in the last section, the first time the trick has appeared at a Winter Olympics.

Canadian Mark McMorris, also Su’s idol, finished with the best score of 88.53 to take the bronze. He managed to complete his classic triple cork 1620 in his third run to leapfrog the American Redmond Gerard in the ranking table.

Slovenia wins ski jumping mixed team gold

Slovenia soared to a convincing victory in the newly-introduced ski jumping mix team at the Olympic Winter Games on Monday, reports Xinhua.

At the National Ski Jumping Centre, the Slovenian team of Nika Kriznar, Timi Zajc, Ursa Bogataj and Peter Prevc won each of the two rounds and claimed the gold medal with a total of 1001.5 points, 111.2 more than the second-placed Russian Olympic Committee (ROC). It was the second gold for Slovenia after its victory in the women’s normal hill individual by Bogataj.

Canada bagged a bronze with 844.6 points with stable performance in both rounds.

Germanyls Denise Herrmann, with a single penalty in second prone, covered the women’s 15km individual biathlon in 44 minutes and 12.7 seconds to win the gold medal on Monday.

The 33-year-old Herrmann switched to biathlon from cross-country skiing in 2016 as she wanted a new challenge. She won bronze in a cross-country relay at Sochi in 2014.

“It’s a dream you have as a child and the dream came true today. It’s unbelievable,” said Herrmann, who finished 6th in the pursuit and 11th in the mass start at the 2018 Games.

Anais Chevalier Bouchet of France claimed silver with one penalty in second standing, 9.4 seconds adrift of Herrmann.

China’s Ren wins men’s short-track gold

At Beijing, China’s ace short-track speed skater Ren Ziwei clinched his first individual Olympic gold medal in the menls 1,000m in one minute and 26.768 seconds on Monday.

It was China’s second gold at the 2022 Games after their victory in the 2,000m mixed team relay of short-track speed skating.

Another Chinese skater Li Wenlong took the silver in 1:29.917. Hungarian Liu Shaoang bagged the bronze in 1:35.693.

IANS