Kiwis top qualifying at Winter Olympics
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- 2 min read
New Zealand snowboarders Dane Menzies and Zoi Sadowski-Synnott have topped their respective slopestyle qualification at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
With bad weather forecast, the competition was brought forward a day, with Menzies putting in a strong first run which included a switch backside 1260 into frontside 1440, finishing with a 1660.
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His score of 86.06 put him in the top spot, where he stayed.
"It felt pretty good for sure, I definitely was not expecting that," said Menzies. "I didn't expect the judges to score that high, but they're liking my selection of rails, so that's good."
In the women's qualifying rounds, defending Olympic champion Sadowski-Synnott made an immediate statement, posting an opening score of 81.73 to move into second place.
She went big on run two, adding a 1260 to her jump line and lifting her score to 88.08 to take over first place.
"It feels really good to land," said Sadowski-Synnott. "There was a lot of pressure going into today, but I'm just grateful that we got good weather so that all the girls could show their best snowboarding."
Lyon Farrell and Rocco Jamieson finished 15th and 18th, respectively, in the men's slopestyle qualifying, while Lucia Georgalli was 20th in the women's.
The women's slopestyle final is scheduled for Tuesday (1am Wednesday NZT), with the men's ride for gold on Wednesday (12.30am Thursday NZT).
He had three clean jumps all above 84.25, with the third-highest competition score of 92.00, ahead of the final on Tuesday (7.30am Wednesday NZT). Fellow Kiwis Ben Barclay was 19th and Lucas Ball was 24th.
On Saturday (Sunday NZT), Sylvia Trotter and Ruby Star Andrews missed out on qualifying for the women's freeski big air final, finishing 21st and 24th, respectively.
Meanwhile, Alice Robinson finished eighth in a tight women's giant slalom on Sunday, missing out on the podium by just 0.13 seconds.
Italy's Federica Brignone completed a golden double on home snow, adding the giant slalom title to the Super-G won last week, while USA alpine ski great Mikaela Shiffrin again missed out on a medal, finishing 11th.
Robinson made a couple of minor mistakes on her first run and was sitting in 10th position. She managed to improve a couple of places on her second run.
"I was pretty disappointed," Robinson said, describing the moment when she first crossed the line to see that she had missed out on a medal spot.
"I came down, and I saw I was in fourth (at that point) and only 12 hundredths behind. It was hard, but then watching the rest of the race play out, it actually ended up a bit better than I thought."
Robinson finished tied for eighth in the Super-G last week.