Step aside Eileen Gu. Hosts China have a new teenage hero at the Beijing Olympics after 17-year-old Su Yiming yesterday added an emphatic snowboard big air gold to his controversial silver.
Su scorched to the big air title with a runaway score of 182.50 to win his second medal at the Games, having been unlucky to only come away with silver in last week’s slopestyle.
The former child actor was so good that he had the title in the bag even before his third and final run.
Photo: AFP
Su’s latest success went viral on Sina Weibo, where a hashtag about it clocked up about 750 million views in just a few hours.
He took a dominant gold ahead of Norway’s Mons Roisland, on 171.75, with Canada’s Max Parrot — the slopestyle winner — taking bronze with 170.25.
Su has competed in just six FIS Snowboard World Cup events and last week became the first men’s snowboarding Olympic medalist in China’s history.
Photo: Reuters
“This feels insane, it’s something I’ve never experienced before... I can’t believe I got this gold,” Su said. “I trained every day for the past four years. Every night I was dreaming about this moment.”
When he was eight, Su appeared in the epic action movie The Taking of Tiger Mountain (智取威虎山), before deciding to fully dedicate himself to snowboarding.
With hair that tumbles below his ears, he still has something of the film star about him.
Su’s silver in the slopestyle had been contentious, with many experts saying that he should have been awarded gold ahead of Parrot.
Iztok Sumatic, the head judge in Beijing, subsequently told the snowboarding magazine Whitelines that they made a mistake in the scoring of Parrot.
Su put all that behind him yesterday and said he had been motivated by competing on home snow and by his passion for the sport.
“I wanted to try my best for this,” he said. “The most important thing though is all about love. Snowboarding is not just about competition.”
In a touching moment, Su pointed at his parents when he was standing on the podium.
“I haven’t seen my parents for the past seven months because I went to Europe for training and to many places for competitions,” he said. “This moment is so special for me and also my family.”
Su even managed — for a time at least — to upstage Californian-born Gu, his Chinese teammate and the unofficial face of the Games.
Eighteen-year-old Gu, who represented the US before switching to the country of her mother’s birth in 2019, now has one gold and one silver after she came second in the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle earlier in the day.
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