Team USA’s Red Gerard and Chris Corning find themselves on the outside looking in on the snowboard big air podium for the second Olympics in a row.
Gerard came in fifth place, the same spot he finished at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, while Corning came in seventh. China’s Su Yiming won gold, Norway’s Mons Roisland won silver and Canada’s Max Parrot won bronze.
Gerard moved into third place with an 83.25 on his final run to go along with an 82.50 on his second run, giving him an overall score of 165.75. His spot in a medal position was short-lived, though, as Japan’s Hiroaki Kunitake, the eventual fourth-place finisher, passed him with an 84.00 third-run score.
As the third snowboarder on the hill, Corning turned things up quickly with a quad cork 1800 that earned a 92.00 score. He was unable to complete his second trick and only earned a 64.00 on this third run, bringing his overall total to 156.00. His seventh-place finish comes four years after he finished fourth in PyeongChang.
Nobody was a match for Yiming, though. The 17-year-old, who also earned silver in slopestyle on Feb. 7, won gold in his home country with two dominant runs right off the bat. He used a pair of 1800s to build an insurmountable total of 182.50, 8.25 points higher than Canada’s Sebastien Toutant’s overall score from his gold medal win in PyeongChang. Yiming even got to do a celebratory run to cap off the competition since his win was already in the bag.
Roisland’s place on the podium was much less certain. The Norwegian needed to land a back-side 1600 to move into second place, and even then he was still more than 10 points off Yiming’s score.
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Roisland’s final run pushed Parrot down a spot and into bronze. The medal is the second for Parrot in Beijing after he beat out Yiming for gold in slopestyle. He also has a silver in slopestyle from 2018.
Here are the final standings:
- Su Yiming, China: 182.50
- Mons Roisland, Norway: 171.75
- Max Parrot, Canada: 170.25
- Hiroaki Kunitake, Japan: 166.25
- Red Gerard, United States: 165.75
- Niek van der Velden, Netherlands: 162.00
- Chris Corning, United States: 156.00
- Marcus Kleveland, Norway: 150.00
- Kateru Otsuka, Japan: 128.75
- Mark McMorris, Canada: 113.75
- Sven Thorgren, Sweden: 88.50
- Darcy Sharpe, Canada: 87.75