The United States captured a pair of medals in men’s freestyle skiing halfpipe on Saturday in Zhangjiakou, defying gravity as much as Hebei Province’s punishing, snow-and-wind-blown conditions would allow.
Saturday’s master of the slope, Nico Porteous of New Zealand, won the gold medal with his first run, when he scored a 93. David Wise, who had won the event’s past two golds, also found his first run to be his best: a 90.75, good for silver at these Games. With an 86.75 on his first run on Saturday, Alex Ferreira, who won the silver in halfpipe at the 2018 Games, earned the bronze.
There were plenty of dazzling tricks — Porteous landed five, including back-to-back ones with four and a half rotations, during the run that gave him Saturday’s top spot — but organizers officially reported the air temperature as minus 12 Fahrenheit, and persistently tough winds led many of the skiers to curb their ambitions.
“People were getting blown onto the deck, and even when the wind wasn’t blowing people like onto the deck or in the middle, it was just there,” said Gus Kenworthy, who competed for Britain and finished eighth, eight years after earning a silver medal in Sochi. “It was spiraling in the middle, so it was really killing amplitude. People had to strip their runs back so much.”
More than half of the 12-man field, including Porteous and Wise, had at least one run on Saturday that yielded only a single-digit score.
“The guys that are in the top three right now had insane runs, but those are not the runs they wanted to do,” Kenworthy said. “I know that most of the field really downgraded just to try to put one down.”
Wise appeared a bit awed by how Porteous had navigated the treachery of the freestyle skiing finale of the Beijing Games, which will end on Sunday.
“He pretty much did the run he wanted to in spite of the wind,” he said, “whereas Alex and myself, we scaled back a little bit and landed a run we thought we’d do well on this day.”
But Porteous acknowledged the day’s perils, even as he reveled in a gold medal four years after he took bronze at the Games.
“I stomped what I knew and tried my best and left everything out there,” he said.
He added, though: “It’s so freezing cold right now, I’m lost for words.”
