Freestyle skier David Wise from the USA has repeated his Olympic victory from the halfpipe premiere in 2014 at the Pyeongchang Winter Games.
The 27-year-old X-Games winner, with 97.20 points in the last of three rounds, showed the best performance of the final and ousted his compatriot Alex Ferreira (96.40) and the 16-year-old New Zealander Nico Porteous (94.80) to places two and three.
German athletes were not at the start in Pyeongchang. For the freestyle skiers from the USA it was the first gold of these games, Nick Goepper had won silver in the slopestyle competition on Sunday, Brita Sigourney bronze in the halfpipe. World champion Aaron Blunck reached only seventh place on Thursday with 84.80 points.
For New Zealand, it was already the two bronze medals of the day and these winter games. Zoi Sadowski Synnott had finished third in the big air competition of snowboarders about an hour and a half earlier. The best result for New Zealand is still Annelise Coberger’s silver medal in the alpine slalom of Albertville 1992.