Parallel Giant Slalom, Men

This event had multiple medal contenders with no clear favorite. Dmitry Loginov (ROC) was the 2019 and 2021 World Champion and had one win and one second in the 2021/22 World Cup season. Germany’s Stefan Baumeister was the most consistent World Cup skier with two wins and two seconds on the season. Also expected to contend were PyeongChang 2018 silver medalist Lee Sang-Ho (KOR) with three medals (1-1-1) in five World Cup races, Italian Roland Fischnaller, competing in his sixth Winter Olympics, and 2021 World Championship silver medalist Andrey Sobolev (ROC).

Lee led the qualifiers with Austria’s Benjamin Karl in second. Karl had won a silver medal in this event but it was back in 2010, and he also had a bronze medal in the parallel slalom from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

Lee lost in the quarter-finals, losing to American-born Vic Wild (ROC) by 0.01 seconds, while Karl kept winning, defeating Fischnaller in the semi-finals. Karl’s final opponent was Tim Mastnak of Slovenia, silver medalist in the event at the 2019 World Championships, but who had little recent success on the World Cup circuit.

Karl won his third Olympic snowboarding medal with a comfortable margin over Mastnak, while Wild took the bronze medal when Fischnaller could not finish. Karl’s 12-year gap between medals in the event was the longest ever in Olympic snowboarding, and it made him the first Olympic snowboarder with a complete Olympic medal set. Wild also won a third Olympic snowboarding medal.