Olympics
Norwegian Freeskier Birk Ruud came away with gold in a Men’s Slopestyle Final that featured athletes struggling to land their tricks through the rail section and graceful airs with dizzying numbers of spins. American Alex Hall came away with silver and Kiwi Luca Harrington came from behind in the final run to secure bronze.
The whole field was going for gold on the first run, not holding back any technicality on the opening rails. More than half the field fell or made minor mistakes, mailing in the rest of the run to wait for the second and third runs. Birk Ruud strung together a top to bottom performance putting him in the early lead. Switzerland’s Andri Ragettli and Sweden’s Jesper Tjader in second and third. Tjader’s opening run commanded respect with a switch backflip onto the first rail, but Ruud’s second and third rails brought similar levels of difficulty, where Tjader backed off a little bit.
In the second run, Alex Hall flawlessly executed a set of tricks that was not the most technically demanding of the field, but the flow and style of the whole run helped propel him from fifth to second place. A few other competitors improved on botched first runs, making it down clean, but moving into the final run, at least half a dozen skiers had shown they had the technical chops to win, they just had to stomp every trick.
Ruud’s teammate Sebastian Schjerve went for broke on the final run, delivering a double switch up on the final 60 foot rail and stomped three huge jumps, but came up just short of the podium. Luca Harrington put the pressure on with a 630 onto his first rail and three huge airs on the lower half of the course to move into third. Both Alex Hall and Andri Ragettli had problems in their final run. Tjader fell in his opening backflip onto the rail after stomping in his first two runs, leaving Ruud with a glory run down to gold. But, Ruud lined up for his final lap with his game face on, intending on making a statement, but stumbled on the second rail. He still came away as the winner of Men’s Slopestyle.
