PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—Cassie Sharpe had three chances to win a gold medal.She only needed one.She soared into the lead in women’s ski halfpipe on the first of her three runs and never looked back.Ii was her big tricks — including a triple spin — and the fearless way she rode high above the pipe’s 22-foot-high walls that she will be remembered for as much as the medal itself.And that’s just the way she wanted it“I want someone to look and say: ‘Wow, I want to ski like that,’ ” the 22-year-old from Comox, B.C., said here before her event.“Winning is always a bonus.”Sharpe always likes to land her first run. It’s a confidence builder, for one. But when the score is as high as hers tend to be — 94.40 in the first run of the final — it also gives her freedom to add more progressive and riskier moves to her subsequent runs. Those are the ones she loves to perform.So, hand on her heart in gratitude on seeing the winning score after each run, she simply went back up to better it. Her second run netted 95.80 points, her top score.France’s Marie Martinod won the silver medal and American Brita Sigourney the bronze.Sharpe first announced herself in 2015 as one of the most technical skiers to ever drop into a women’s halfpipe competition and she came here as the favourite for gold.She showed that Olympic pressure hadn’t changed that during qualifying the day before, when she soared high over the field, setting the tone for the entire competition. Where some skiers had looked hesitant on their first runs, Sharpe dropped in with the hardest tricks in the field and made them all look easy.Sharpe’s competition resume is full of examples of times she had gone for more, even after she had secured the win. That’s at the very core of her personality as a freestyle skier, said Canada’s head coach, Trennon Payner.“It shows why she’s doing it. It ...
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