LIVIGNO, Italy – Eileen Gu’s second Winter Olympics isn’t going quite as well as her first, but by the way she celebrated winning the big air silver medal, she isn’t going to walk away disappointed.
Against a stronger field of freestyle skiers that executed bigger and better tricks than four years ago in Beijing, the American-born Gu, who now competes for China, was unable to defend her gold medal in this event but put together two good runs and simply got beat by outstanding tricks from Canada’s Megan Oldham. Italy’s Flora Tabanelli took the bronze.
Gu had an excellent first run, scoring 90.00 with a double cork 1440, but a mediocre second run put her in a precarious position going into the final round.
In big air, skiers get three attempts and are ranked by their two best scores combined.
Gu’s final run was spectacular — a perfectly-executed left side double cork 1260 that inspired her to throw her fists in the air as the 89.00 score came in, putting her into second place behind Oldham and holding that position until the end.
It was Gu’s second medal of these Olympics, joining the silver she won in slopestyle. She still has one more event before she goes back to Stanford — where she’s re-enrolling as a junior after the Olympics — in the halfpipe where she’s also the defending gold medalist.
The start of the big air final was delayed by 75 minutes as significant snow with wind gusts up to 18 miles an hour made the conditions too dangerous for a sport where competitors ski down a 15-story ramp, launch themselves into the air and perform their biggest trick.
Even though conditions improved, snow was still falling at the beginning of the final and picked up throughout. But that didn’t stop the competitors from trying massive tricks – including Muir’s leftside double cork 1620 – 4 ½ full rotations with two off-axis flips and a Cindy grab – that scored a 93.0 and launched her into position to win if she could execute one more big trick on her final run.
Ironically, that’s the same audacious trick Gu landed on her third and final attempt in 2022 to win her second gold medal in Beijing. Trying to make something special happen again and repeat what Gu did four years ago, Muir went huge on her final run but did not land it.
Both Swiss skiers, Anouk Andraska and Mathilde Gremaud, were forced to withdraw from the finals due to injuries suffered during training Monday before the final.
Gremaud, who edged out Gu for the slopestyle gold medal last week, injured her hip according to an official release from Swiss Ski and would have been a contender to hit the podium in big air. It’s unclear at this point whether the injury will take her out of the halfpipe competition scheduled for the end of the week.