Choi Gaon of South Korea competes within the Girls’s Snowboard Halfpipe Finals throughout the Toyota US Grand Prix 2025 at Copper Mountain, Dec. 19, in Copper Mountain, Colorado. AFP-Yonhap
COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. — Chloe Kim sat out with an harm. Shaun White has been retired for 4 years. With out them, the world obtained a peek at what snowboarding on the halfpipe appears like heading into the Winter Olympics: It’s now a sport dominated by Japanese, with different Asian stars within the combine.
Japan’s Ryusei Yamada and Korea’s Choi Gaon received the boys’s and ladies’s World Cup occasions Friday at Copper Mountain on a blustery day that featured just one American on both podium: 18-year-old Bea Kim, who took third within the girls’s contest, forward of Japan’s Sena Tomita.
America’s Chloe Kim competed in qualifying Wednesday however suffered an undisclosed harm within the lead-up to the ultimate and sat out. U.S. Ski and Snowboard did not present particulars concerning the harm. This was the one pre-Olympic occasion Kim had signed up for, and the way lacking this closing would possibly impression her upcoming schedule stays to be seen.
The 2-time Olympic gold medalist is the one U.S. halfpipe rider already certified for Milan Cortina, because the American staff appears for somebody to affix her as the game’s headliner now that White, the three-time Olympic champion, has retired.
With out Kim within the lineup, the ladies’s contest performed out like what’s anticipated to be a reasonably good battle for second in Italy come February.
Choi’s win comes one week after her victory at Secret Backyard in China. She was one of many few to strive a 1080-degree bounce and the one one to land one as a part of a clear run over the 16 journeys the eight wholesome girls within the contest took down the halfpipe.
No person actually tries doing what Kim pulled off 4 years in the past in China to win her gold — spinning all 4 methods on her jumps down the halfpipe. She blew away the sphere then. Most on this sport the place no one reveals all their playing cards this early in an Olympic season are satisfied she has most likely gotten higher since.
“That is not my place to say, that is her story to inform,” mentioned Bea Kim, a good friend of Chloe’s who conceded her third-place run wouldn’t be adequate to land on the Olympic podium.
The Japanese weren’t at their finest, both.
Yuto Totsuka, who completed second final week in China as a part of a Japanese sweep, tried to throw a triple cork on his closing run to take first place, however he fell.
That left Yamada with the victory and supplied yet one more sign of the rising depth of the Japanese staff. Yamada completed fifth final week. This week, Olympic champion Ayumu Hirano wasn’t even at Copper Mountain. Ruka Hirano, ranked second early within the season behind Australia’s Scotty James , completed eighth.
“They’re simply pushing us, and it is consistently feeding off that power,” mentioned Chase Josey, a two-time Olympian for the U.S. who completed twelfth. “They have been type of main the pack, and that motivates us.”
