The gold medal from nowhere
SHE barely got an hour’s notice, but Wanaka snowboarder Zoi SadowskiSynnott just topped an Olympic medal.
The 17yearold outdid the bronze medal she picked up at the Winter Olympics last year in Korea by becoming New Zealand’s first snowboarding X Games winner yesterday, when she came from nowhere to win the slopestyle event.
She described it yesterday as ‘‘Insane . . . beyond my wildest dreams.’’
Late on Friday night [NZ time] she claimed the snowboard big air silver.
SadowskiSynnott had started off at the beginning of the week as being the second reserve in the slopestyle.
But Austrian Anna Gasser pulled out a few days before the competition and then barely an hour before the competition started, Slovakia’s Klaudia Medlova withdrew, giving the Wanaka athlete a chance at glory at Aspen.
The second rider to drop into the course, SadowskiSynnott stomped her first run with backtoback 900s and a double wildcat to score 90 points from a possible 100.
Holding the top spot after run one but knowing seven of the world’s best athletes would be chasing hard, SadowskiSynnott looked to tidy up her trick execution, and was able to up her score to a 91 on her last run.
United States snowboarder Hailey Langford came close to toppling SadowskiSynnott, recording 90.66 on the final run.
An Otago Daily Times Class Act recipient last year, SadowskiSynnott was on cloud nine after the win.
‘‘The X Games for us snowboarders is the best of the best, an inviteonly which has been around so long.
‘‘Doing this today means so much to me, probably a career highlight. I honestly came here this week just wanting to get a feel for the X games — I was only in the big air at that point and focusing on that.’’
She would now move on to the World Championships in Utah in 10 days time, and the victory has opened up invitations to other events.
Her father Sean said yesterday her coach Mitch Brown had told them just before the event that Zoi was exhausted, but was hoping to go out and give it a crack.
Obviously she did.