Porteous bests field, wind to take Olympic ski halfpipe gold

ZHANGJIAKOU, China (AP) — There was blood on the right ear of freestyle skier Nico Porteous after a crash into the halfpipe wall on a trick gone wrong in the whipping wind. His shoulder ached, too.

On top of that, the 20-year-old from New Zealand was freezing and wind-blown.

But he’s never felt better. Olympic gold medals tend to do that.

Porteous overcame the swirling wind to win the ski halfpipe title on Saturday in a final where many competitors struggled to perform their best tricks. Porteous scored a 93 during his opening run in the last event at the Genting Snow Park. He had his share of trouble, too, becoming inverted on his second run and landing on his head.

“I stomped what I knew,” Porteous said of performing in the frigid and windy conditions. “Tried my best and left everything out there … It’s so freezing cold right now, I’m lost for words.”

Two-time Olympic champion David Wise of the United States took home the silver with his first-run score of 90.75. The 31-year-old Wise won the event at its Olympic debut in 2014 and again in ’18. His teammate, Alex Ferreira, threw down a strong first run, twirling his right ski pole at the bottom in elation, to end up with the bronze.

“It was a pretty wild day out there with the wind,” Wise said. “But that’s part of our competition — you can’t always schedule it on the perfect day.”

The podium was the same as at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, just in a different order. Back then, it went Wise, Ferreira and Porteous.

“We’re a bunch of workhorses, I guess,” Ferreira cracked. “Just to be on the podium is unbelievable. It was such a difficult contest with some really tough conditions.”

The last competitor to go, Aaron Blunck, crashed his head and shoulder into the wall of the halfpipe while trying to land a trick in the breezy conditions. Wise ran up the halfpipe in his ski boots to check on his teammate. Blunck eventually sat up and made his way down.

Just before Blunck went, NBC Olympic freestyle skiing analyst Tom Wallisch commented: “These conditions are abysmal right now.”

And after his first run, Blunck, the top qualifier, labeled the competition “gnarly.” It had nothing to do with the performances and everything to do with the windy weather. Quite a few competitors caught wind gusts in the air and either had to bail on tricks or even worse, crashed. A common sight was watching skiers hike back up the halfpipe to retrieve a ski. Or, in the case of Wise, both of them after his wipeout in his second run.

Although the wind was reported to be around 15 mph (24 kph), the gusts kept on coming. It was cold, too, with the wind chill hovering around minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 32 degrees Celsius).

“I think most of the main guys have scaled their runs back,” said Gus Kenworthy, the American freestyler who won silver at the 2014 Sochi Games in slopestyle and now represents Britain in the halfpipe. “The top three were so impressive, their runs were so good. But they’re not the runs that they wanted to do coming out here. Everyone has had to adapt and modify … It’s a tough tough day to do this.”

Maybe even too tough. Perhaps if this event wasn’t at the end of the Olympic program, it might have been delayed.

“I mean, people were getting blown onto the deck. And even when the wind wasn’t blowing people on the deck or in the middle, it was just there,” Kenworthy said. “You see people waiting at the top, looking for a moment where it doesn’t really look windy in the pipe. But then, unfortunately, the way it works is that then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s clear,’ and you drop and it ends up being not a very good time to go. It was just really gusty, unpredictable.”

___

More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports