Beijing 2022: Snowboard halfpipe preview
Feb 08, 2022·Snowboard Park & Pipe
One of the most highly-anticipated events of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games is set to hit the Genting Snow Park this week, with Olympic halfpipe competitions slated to drop in beginning on Wednesday with women’s and men’s qualifications (women at 9:30 local time, men at 12:30), followed by women’s finals on Thursday beginning at 9:30, and men’s finals on Friday, also starting at 9:30.
This will be snowboard halfpipe’s seventh turn at the Olympic Winter Games, and throughout it’s Olympic history halfpipe competition has produced some of the O-show’s most compelling, and thrilling storylines. This week, it’s looking like the Beijing 2022 contest is shaping up to be perhaps the most compelling of them all.
THE VENUE
The pipe in Genting Snow Park is a beast - 190m long, 21m across, an incline of 18.2 degrees and the standard 7.1m/22ft in height. In test events leading up to the Games it was heralded by many riders as being the best they had ever dropped in on and, as one would expect, it’s currently in the best shape it has ever been in preparation for competition this week.
One thing that stands out about the Beijing 2022 halfpipe venue is the massive wind fence stretching along the entire length of the pipe on lookers left, acting as a buffer for the persistent Genting Snow Park breezes.
So far the wind hasn’t been an overwhelming factor at Beijing 2022 snowboard competition, and the weather forecast for at least Tuesday’s qualification runs looks more than manageable. Hopes are high for that trend to continue throughout the three days of competition.
THE RIDERS - WOMEN
PyeongChang 2018 women’s podium:
GOLD - Chloe Kim (USA)
SILVER - Liu Jaiyu (CHN)
BRONZE - Arielle Gold (USA)
Pretty much anyway you look at it, the gold medal result on the women’s side of things seems like a foregone conclusion, as Chloe Kim is, bar none, the most dominant rider in any of the competitions slated to go down over the course of the Games at Genting Snow Park.
Kim comes into Beijing 2022 on a win streak of six in a row since she broke her nearly two-year sabbatical and returned to competition at the beginning of 2020/21, and her wins in that time have including Aspen 2021 World Championships gold, the 2021 X Games gold, this year’s Dew Tour win, and two Laax Open triumphs.
Not only has Kim been absolutely crushing the field since returning to the pipe, she’s been doing it while experimenting with her run, subbing different tricks as she feels like it and only dropping her back-to-back 1080 combo when absolutely necessary. On top of that, she still hasn’t thrown her double cork 1080 in competition, even though she first landed it back in the 2018/19 season.
That being said, all signs point to the fact that the back-to-back 1080s are going to be old news by the time Kim is done with the Beijing 2022 pipe, as the 21-year-old has announced she’s got three new tricks to reveal to the world this week.
Whatever those new tricks may be, Kim probably doesn’t need them to defend her gold medal, as few today can even touch her winning run from four years ago in PyeongChang. Which means that when she does bring the new stuff to the table - and she will, regardless of whether it’s needed or not - she’s going to once again be setting a standard that the rest of the field will be chasing far into the future.
Kim’s biggest rival this week should be her U.S. teammate Maddie Mastro, the one other women who we know has a dub cork in her arsenal. However, while Mastro beat Kim to take the 2019 US Open win, and is the first - and so far only - woman to land a double crippler in competition, she’s also been battling an ankle injury suffered at the Dew Tour. How fit she’ll be to push the envelope here in Beijing remains to be seen.
Another rider who’s proven capable of pushing Kim on her best day is Queralt Castellet of Spain, the 32-year-old veteran who just seems to be, somehow, getting better every season.
Castellet had Kim against the ropes at this years Dew Tour, forcing Kim to stomp a third and final run that only landed the U.S. rider in first place by one point ahead of Castellet.
While Castellet has two career World Championships podiums (including Aspen 2021 silver behind Kim), 17 World Cup podiums (including six wins), an X Games win in 2020, and top three results at essentially every snowboard contest on earth at some point over the course of her lengthy career, she has yet to earn a piece of Olympic hardware. Here at Beijing 2022 in her fifth Olympic start, the rider nicknamed “Cannonball” looks to be the best positioned she’s ever been to finally stand on the five-ringed podium.
It won’t just be Castellet and Mastro doing their best to stand in Kim’s way, however, as the four-rider Japanese team represents the strongest top-to-bottom squad here at the Games.
The Tomita sisters Sena and Ruki have become consistent podium threats in the past 14 months or so, with Ruki taking her first major international win at the Mammoth Mountain World Cup, and then older sister Sena following that up with the X Games win a couple of weeks later.
Haruna Matsumoto finished third there in Aspen at X, while Kurumi Imai finished just off the podium in fourth, meaning that every one of the Japanese four are rolling into Genting with some momentum.
Finally, there’s the legendary veterans of the host Chinese squad, Liu Jaiyu and Cai Xuetong.
Liu is the reigning Olympic silver medallist, the 2009 World Champion, and has 23 World Cup podiums and 11 wins in her lengthy career.
Cai, meanwhile, is only the most decorated World Cup freestyle snowboarder of all time, and is fresh off winning her seventh career halfpipe crystal globe. With 13 career World Cup wins and 29 career World Cup podiums, as well as two World Championships titles and three X Games medals, few riders in snowboard history have hit as many podiums as the 28-year-old.
Either one of those riders has a strong outside chance at a Beijing 2022 podium, and a place in Olympic history at their home country event.
THE RIDERS - MEN
PyeongChang 2018 men’s podium
GOLD - Shaun White (USA)
SILVER - Ayumu Hirano (JPN)
BRONZE - Scotty James (AUS)
The Beijing 2022 men’s halfpipe competition has all the pieces in place to be the greatest of all time.
First up, there’s the storylines, and number one on everyone’s lips is the competition swan song of the greatest to ever do it in the halfpipe - Shaun White of the USA.
Now 35 years old, the three-time Olympic champion White has announced that Beijing 2022 will be his last competition, bringing a remarkable era in snowboarding to a close.
There’s not much to say about White that hasn’t already been said, but it’s worth rewatching his incredible final-run triumph from PyeongChang 2018 to be reminded that we might not ever again see a rider with the same combination of pure athleticism, laser-guided determination, and prime time-ready flair for the dramatic again in snowboarding.
In so many ways White exists as an entity far above and beyond the scope of snowboarding, which has made his sometimes-humbling return to competition a must-watch storyline in-and-of itself.
A whole lot of people ‘in the know’ believe that White has next to no chance at a podium here in Beijing, as the halfpipe world that he was so long at the forefront of surpassed him in the three years he took off after his win in PyeongChang.
However, while what we’ve seen from him since he put the bib back on at the end of last season has mostly been a rehash of runs he pioneered half a decade ago, the style, power, and determination that he attacks the pipe with cannot be denied even at this point in his career.
But that’s just one thread in the tangled tale of this upcoming men’s competition, as two-time Olympic silver medallist Ayumu Hirano has also returned to the halfpipe after stepping back from snowboarding following PyeongChang 2018, with some much greater results than his rival White.
First, we saw the still only 23-year-old Hirano stomping a smooth frontside triple 1440 in preseason training in Saas Fee, before becoming the first rider to stomp the trick in competition at the Dew Tour in December.
Following that, he took down a couple World Cup wins at Mammoth and Laax to claim this season’s crystal globe, before grabbing X Games silver just before heading to China for the Games.
Now he’s here in Genting Snow Park chucking casual triples in training, and with every stomp announcing that the game has changed.
But Ayumu Hirano is just one of three Japanese riders with a triple cork in their trick quiver, as Yuto Totsuka and Ruka Hirano (no relation to Ayumu) both have video evidence of their own variations.
Of those two, Ruka is the only one who’s attempted the trick in competition, though he failed to put it down at the Laax Open in January. However, over the past couple seasons it’s been Totsuka who’s been the most dominant competition rider, and while he’s struggled to find the top of the podium this season, it feels like he’s only one run away from blowing the lid off the halfpipe world all over again.
Finally, there’s Scotty James, the 27-year-old PyeongChang 2018 bronze medallist who went on an astonishing run of 11-straight victories through the 2018/19 and 2019/20 seasons, only to be bested by Ruka Hirano at the Calgary Snow Rodeo and then not return to the top of the podium for over two years.
While some were counting James out as finished as a world-beater and saying that he peaked at the wrong time, a win two weeks ago at the X Games proved that there’s plenty left in the Aussie’s tank yet. Throw in the fact that he’s rumoured to have as many as three triple cork variations in the bag and suddenly the path to gold for the rest of the best gets much more complicated, indeed.
The upcoming showdown between the legend Shaun White, the Japanese triple threat of Hirano, Hirano and Totsuka, and the perfectionist Scotty James sets the stage for what could very well be the greatest competition in snowboard halfpipe history.
And all of that is being said without even factoring in the underdogs.
The tech wizard Jan Scherrer (SUI), the moon-boosting Valentino Guseli (AUS), the hard-charging Andre Hoefflich (GER); few would wager on a podium for riders outside of the big five mentioned above, but stranger things have happened at the Olympic Winter Games.
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