Supper and snow
I sat down to supper in front of the TV and watched the women's half-pipe snowboarding. Frigging wow!
I promised myself I'd turn off the TV when the event ended. Well, I stayed to watch Chloe Kim's last and celebratory run. The women's half-pipe is best-of-three, and she had the highest score at the end of the second round, 93.75, evidently out of 100. That scheduled her for the last run in the third round, which theoretically wouldn't even be necessary unless someone topped that. She was pretty far ahead of the rest and nobody did, so her last run could be a victory lap... except, as the announcers put it, she did an exclamation point instead: She pulled out all the stops and went fast, high, and showy/tough. She didn't miss a beat, and the judges gave her.... I'll let NBC tell it:
Chloe Kim wins snowboard halfpipe gold in Olympic debut
February 12, 2018 at 2:34 PM [Korea time]
By: Shawn Smith
Chloe Kim wins Olympic gold at age 17.
The expectations placed upon Chloe Kim could not have been any higher entering the PyeongChang Olympics. But the 17-year-old delivered on the biggest stage, earning her first Olympic gold medal in women's snowboard halfpipe on Tuesday morning in South Korea.
Kim set the bar extremely high on her first run, landing a backside air, frontside 1080, cab 720, frontside 900, McTwist and frontside inverted 720.¹
That run scored her a 93.75 and gave her a huge lead over the rest of the field.
A few women successfully landed the trick, but none could match Kim's score.
By the time her final run came around, the gold medal was secure and Kim was free to take a victory lap. Instead, she attempted to add an exclamation point by landing her most technical² sequence of tricks - the back-to-back 1080s.
That combination of a frontside 1080 into a cab 1080 in the middle of her run had bedeviled Kim earlier in the contest. She had attempted it on her second run but fell on the second 1080 attempt.
On her victory lap though, Kim stomped both of her 1080s, then landed the rest of her run. The final score from the judges: 98.25. And with that, Kim was officially the new Olympic champion.
Results
1. Chloe Kim (USA), 98.25
2. Liu Jiayu (CHN), 89.75
3. Arielle Gold (USA), 85.75
4. Kelly Clark (USA), 83.50
5. Cai Xuetong (CHN), 76.50 ³
6. Haruna Matsumoto (JPN), 70.00
7. Queralt Castellet (ESP), 67.75 ³
8. Sena Tomita (JPN), 65.25
9. Mirabelle Thovex (FRA), 63.00
10. Sophie Rodriguez (FRA), 50.50
11. Emily Arthur (AUS), 48.25
12. Maddie Mastro (USA), 14.00
-------------------------------
¹ Backside & frontside are the back and front of the body, apparently to specify the direction of a midair spin -- don't ask me how, all I know of those terms is what I picked up from the announcers. The numbers are degrees: 720°= 2 full rotations, 900° = 2½, and 1080° = 3.
² I.e., with the highest degree of technical difficulty.
³ You know me: language geek. So I kept mentally correcting the announcers' mispronunciations. Not "Kay Jootong", it's "Tsy Shweh-dawng".*
(There is now a cat lying on my chest, with her head exactly blocking the line of sight from my eyes to where I was holding my smartphone.)
And Queralt Castellet isn't "Kay-roh Kastalay": her name's not French or even Spanish, it's Catalan: [kɛ'ral kastɛ'λɛt] "keh-RAHL kaste-LYET". In this video she introduces herself at 0:06.
* As near as I can respell it for American non-linguists.
This entry was originally posted at https://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1687509.html. You can comment here, or there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth ID.
comments there so far.
I promised myself I'd turn off the TV when the event ended. Well, I stayed to watch Chloe Kim's last and celebratory run. The women's half-pipe is best-of-three, and she had the highest score at the end of the second round, 93.75, evidently out of 100. That scheduled her for the last run in the third round, which theoretically wouldn't even be necessary unless someone topped that. She was pretty far ahead of the rest and nobody did, so her last run could be a victory lap... except, as the announcers put it, she did an exclamation point instead: She pulled out all the stops and went fast, high, and showy/tough. She didn't miss a beat, and the judges gave her.... I'll let NBC tell it:
Chloe Kim wins snowboard halfpipe gold in Olympic debut
February 12, 2018 at 2:34 PM [Korea time]
By: Shawn Smith
Chloe Kim wins Olympic gold at age 17.
The expectations placed upon Chloe Kim could not have been any higher entering the PyeongChang Olympics. But the 17-year-old delivered on the biggest stage, earning her first Olympic gold medal in women's snowboard halfpipe on Tuesday morning in South Korea.
Kim set the bar extremely high on her first run, landing a backside air, frontside 1080, cab 720, frontside 900, McTwist and frontside inverted 720.¹
That run scored her a 93.75 and gave her a huge lead over the rest of the field.
A few women successfully landed the trick, but none could match Kim's score.
By the time her final run came around, the gold medal was secure and Kim was free to take a victory lap. Instead, she attempted to add an exclamation point by landing her most technical² sequence of tricks - the back-to-back 1080s.
That combination of a frontside 1080 into a cab 1080 in the middle of her run had bedeviled Kim earlier in the contest. She had attempted it on her second run but fell on the second 1080 attempt.
On her victory lap though, Kim stomped both of her 1080s, then landed the rest of her run. The final score from the judges: 98.25. And with that, Kim was officially the new Olympic champion.
Results
1. Chloe Kim (USA), 98.25
2. Liu Jiayu (CHN), 89.75
3. Arielle Gold (USA), 85.75
4. Kelly Clark (USA), 83.50
5. Cai Xuetong (CHN), 76.50 ³
6. Haruna Matsumoto (JPN), 70.00
7. Queralt Castellet (ESP), 67.75 ³
8. Sena Tomita (JPN), 65.25
9. Mirabelle Thovex (FRA), 63.00
10. Sophie Rodriguez (FRA), 50.50
11. Emily Arthur (AUS), 48.25
12. Maddie Mastro (USA), 14.00
-------------------------------
¹ Backside & frontside are the back and front of the body, apparently to specify the direction of a midair spin -- don't ask me how, all I know of those terms is what I picked up from the announcers. The numbers are degrees: 720°= 2 full rotations, 900° = 2½, and 1080° = 3.
² I.e., with the highest degree of technical difficulty.
³ You know me: language geek. So I kept mentally correcting the announcers' mispronunciations. Not "Kay Jootong", it's "Tsy Shweh-dawng".*
(There is now a cat lying on my chest, with her head exactly blocking the line of sight from my eyes to where I was holding my smartphone.)
And Queralt Castellet isn't "Kay-roh Kastalay": her name's not French or even Spanish, it's Catalan: [kɛ'ral kastɛ'λɛt] "keh-RAHL kaste-LYET". In this video she introduces herself at 0:06.
* As near as I can respell it for American non-linguists.
This entry was originally posted at https://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1687509.html. You can comment here, or there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth ID.
comments there so far.