Slopestyle, Women

Along with the women’s halfpipe, women’s slopestyle was one of the two newest additions to the Olympic freestyle skiing program, having been contested only once before in 2014. At those Games, the winner of the slopestyle contest had been Canadian Dara Howell, but the fervor surrounding her triumph took an emotional toll and caused her skiing to suffer. Even after a year’s break from competition, she had produced only mediocre results on the international stage and was therefore not considered a particular favorite. The other medal winners from those Games, Devin Logan of the United States and Kim Lamarre of Canada, had also been inconsistent in recent years, leaving the competition in 2018 relatively e open. France’s Tess Ledeux was the reigning World Champion and was considered a fair bet to take gold, and certainly one of the favorites.

The qualification round proved difficult for many of the key figures in the tournament; Ledeux posted a moderate score in her first run and crashed out on her second, while both Howell and Lamarre fell victim to botched landings and were eliminated. While attention might have been focused the unlucky favorites in this round, there was no shortage of excellent runs from other competitors, and thus even Ledeux’s more successful first attempt failed to take her to the finals. Leading the qualifiers was Sweden’s Emma Dahlström, the 2015 Winter X Games champion and the 2017 World runner-up, with several others not far behind.

In the final, it was the relatively unheralded Swiss duo of Mathilde Gremaud and Sarah Höfflin who stole the show. Gremaud executed a difficult trick from the get-go and came out on top after the first run, while Höfflin held back somewhat, but still managed to perform impressively enough to land in second. Both skiers fell on their second run, but while Gremaud also failed in her third run, Höfflin successfully completed a complicated trick in her third run and earned a well-deserved gold medal. No one else topped Gremaud’s score from the first run, leaving her with silver, while Izzy Atkin of Great Britain, the 2017 World bronze medalist and 2018 Winter X Games runner-up, snatched bronze away from Maggie Voisin of the United States, the 2018 Winter X Games champion. This was Great Britain’s first-ever podium finish in freestyle skiing.