John Branch, Flying Above the Politics. With style, confidence and a realistic chance to win three golds, the freeskier Eileen Gu is trying to straddle a global divide. New York Times, Feb 5, 2022 (at page D3 of Saturday "Sports: section, which was D).
Quote:
"Gu is an IMG model.
"Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco in 2003. Chinese media often refers to her as the daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father, sometimes with a mention that he was a Harvard graduate. But there is no public record of Gu’s father. She declined to comment when asked if she knew anything about him.
"Freeski is an action-packed sport combining the high-flying tricks of freestyle skiing with the edge-of-your-seat excitement of snowboarding. The sport, which is contested as part of freestyle skiing at the Olympic Winter Games, is relatively new, making its Olympic debut in 2014.
"The sport consists of three primary disciplines: halfpipe, slopestyle and ski cross.
Search images.google.com with (half-pipe skiing) -- no quotation marks -- and you will see the facility.
8 Tips on How to Ski the Halfpipe. YouTube.com, uploaded by "Stomp It Tutorials" on Jan 24, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otxdRersDTI
(especially 2:24 -2:47 of the 14:08 duration)
(C) slopestyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slopestyle
("is a winter sport in which athletes [either] ski or snowboard down a course including a variety of obstacles including rails, jumps and other terrain park features. * * * Slopestyle became an Olympic event, in both skiing and snowboarding forms, at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia")
(i) "The Slopestyle event is most like what you’d find at a resort’s terrain park, except bigger and better. Skiers must navigate their way down a course filled with rails, boxes, jumps and other terrain features, doing so with style and technical proficiency.
(ii) "Ski Cross is the lone Freestyle event that does not use a scoring system to determine the winner. This event pits four skiers in a race on a course with a variety of terrain features such as banks, rollers, spines and jumps. First one to cross the finish line wins, plain and simple.
"An Olympic Ski Cross course spans 393 ft. in vertical, an average inclination of 12 degrees and a track width of only 20 to 52 ft.. As the only Olympic ski event with multiple athletes competing simultaneously on the same course, Ski Cross has the most potential for unpredictability. Because of this, there are rules prohibiting skiers from purposefully impeding or blocking their competitors. Competitors can be disqualified if they were deemed to have broken these rules.