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South Korea's Choi Gaon reacts during Thursday’s final.Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
The light snowfall falling over Livigno Snow Park on Thursday night helped produce one of the bigger Olympic upsets in snowboard history, as Chloe Kim’s bid to become the first rider to win three consecutive Olympic halfpipe gold medals ended just short.
Kim finished with a best score of 88.00 from her opening, settling for silver behind surprise winner Choi Gaon of South Korea, whose heroic third run after a hard fall on her first earned 90.25 and rewrote the Olympic record books. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono took bronze.
For a sport that has spent nearly a decade orbiting Kim’s technical and competitive standard, the result felt seismic – not because she rode poorly, but because someone finally assembled the perfect combination of risk, execution and timing on the night it mattered most.
The loss ends one of the most dominant Olympic streaks in modern winter sport. Kim entered the Games as a two-time defending Olympic champion and the overwhelming favorite to complete a three-peat no snowboarder had ever achieved. Instead, the history belongs to someone else.
The victory came less than six weeks after Kim dislocated her left shoulder, an injury that threatened to derail her Olympic buildup. Instead, the brace she wore throughout the competition became part of the story: a visible reminder of vulnerability for an athlete who has spent most of her career appearing nearly untouchable.
“I’m just happy to be here,” Kim said earlier this week after leading qualifying. “For a little bit, it wasn’t looking too certain.”
Kim first arrived as a global phenomenon at Pyeongchang 2018, when she became the youngest woman ever to win Olympic snowboard gold. Four years later in Beijing, she defended the title while navigating the expectations that come with being the face of a sport. In Livigno, the challenge was different: maintaining dominance while the rest of the field spent eight years trying to catch her.
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