South Shore snowboarders struggle in halfpipe
By Jason Blevins, Denver Post
ASPEN — The future of snowboarding is Chloe Kim.
Mere minutes after a brutal practice crash, the 14-year-old on Saturday toppled Kelly Clark’s dynastic halfpipe dominance. Spinning technical combos with a pair of 900s, a switch method and a switch 720 with floating amplitude, Kim’s final run in the best-of-three contest earned 92 points to beat Clark’s first-run 90.
Last year Kim was the youngest athlete to win an X Games medal with her halfpipe silver. Saturday night she became the youngest Winter X Games gold medalist. She was too young to go to Sochi and she is too young to compete in the World Cup circuit.
Rivals like Hannah Teter of Meyers and Elena Hight of South Lake Tahoe struggled to land clean runs that could thwart the queen of snowboarding’s performance.