‘Snowboarding prodigy’ Choi Ga-on (15) won the World Cup debut.
Ga-on Choi won the gold medal with 92.75 points in the women’s halfpipe final of the 2023-24 International Ski Federation (FIS) Snowboard World Cup held in Copper Mountain, Colorado, USA on the 17th (Korean time).
Ga-on Choi, born in 2008, made her FIS World Cup debut through this event and immediately caused a stir by climbing to the top of the podium. 바카라사이트닷컴
It has been two years since Lee Sang-ho (snowboarding) in December 2021 that a Korean athlete won the Ski and Snowboard World Cup.
Choi Ga-on took first place with 96.00 points in the preliminaries two days ago and advanced to the finals where the top eight competed, and defeated Mitsuki Ono (Japan), who received 90.00 points in the finals that day. Ohno is an athlete who passed the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics preliminaries in second place and finished ninth in the finals.
Ga-on Choi reached the top of the women’s halfpipe division at the FIS Junior World Championships in March 2022, and in January of this year, she was a ‘supernova’ who set the record for the youngest ever win in the superpipe division of the X Games, an extreme sports competition in the United States. The previous record of being the youngest winner of the Chloe Kim held the record for being the youngest winner at 14 years and 9 months, but Ga-on Choi broke the record at 14 years and 3 months.
She also became the youngest winner of the Dew Tour Superpipe in February of this year, and heralded a breakthrough even before her FIS World Cup debut in the 2023-24 season.
Ga-on Choi said, “I am so happy to win her first World Cup. “I will try to achieve better results in the future,” she said after winning.
Chaewoon Lee (17), who competed in the men’s halfpipe held at the same venue, also won a silver medal with 80.00 points, revealing the future of Korean snow sports. Lee Chae-woon succeeded in winning two consecutive competitions after winning a bronze medal at the World Cup held in China earlier this month.
Ayumu Hirano (Japan), winner of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, won the gold medal with 91.00 points.
Snowboard halfpipe is a sport in which athletes perform aerial performances such as turns and jumps on a semi-cylindrical slope, and are scored by a judge to determine ranking. Choi Ga-on and Lee Chae-un have emerged as medal prospects at the 2024 Gangwon Winter Youth Olympics as well as the 2026 Milan Cortina d’Ampezzo Winter Olympics.