The U.S. medal hopes in tonight\u2019s men\u2019s snowboard big air finals rest on one young man \u2014 Ollie Martin, a curious case when it comes to the event. <\/p>\n
Big air amounts to each rider taking one, big, audacious heave from the top of a 50-foot ramp and attempting a single trick. Theoretically, every run is an attempt at the extreme, going for the biggest, best trick. <\/p>\n
Martin is a 17-year-old senior in high school. He was born in New Zealand, but raised mostly in Colorado and calls the Vail Valley home. You would think he\u2019d be planning to bust out the biggest, most daring, most dangerous trick in his bag. You would be wrong. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe way I look at it \u2014 I have a lot of my life ahead of me, and more things that I want to achieve, and I\u2019m just not willing to try something dangerous just because it\u2019s going to get me an extra position (on the leaderboard),\u201d Martin told me last month during a long chat in Aspen. <\/p>\n
Martin wants clean, consistent, proficient tricks. Wherever that puts him at the end of the competition, so be it. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no trick out there that I want to do just to say I can do it,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Martin, the bronze winner in the 2025 big air world championship, reached tonight\u2019s final thanks to a backside 1800 Indy and a frontside 180-mute in qualifications, finishing ninth out of 30 to make the 12-man cut.<\/p>\n
While Martin is a medal hopeful, it will be a tall task to make the podium.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s Yiming Su, the 2022 gold medalist, remains the favorite, while stars Hiroto Ogiwara, Kira Kimura, Taiga Hasegawa and Ryoma Kimata are capable of delivering a Japanese podium sweep.<\/p>\n
Italy\u2019s Ian Matteoli, a 20-year-old from Torino, finished a surprise second in qualifications and will be the local favorite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. medal hopes in tonight\u2019s men\u2019s snowboard big air finals rest on one young man \u2014 Ollie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-279350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}