Think snowboard and you think dazzling tricks, jumps and spins, with judges deciding the winner. But snowboard cross is a race, and it’s a chaotic one, with four athletes racing each other pell-mell down the mountain, around sweeping turns and over jumps.
With all this chaos, you would not expect a repeat winner, but that’s what happened at the Winter Games on Thursday as Alessandro Hämmerle of Austria raced to another gold medal in the men’s event.
The repeat looked unlikely nearly the entire race as Hämmerle sat in third almost the whole way, in an event in which passing isn’t that easy. Yet he took the last jump better than his opponents and made it to the finish line first by a whisker.
Hämmerle just seems to have a nose for the finish line. His title four years ago was by inches as well.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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