The reigning World Champion topped qualification from his heat and wasted no time making his mark in run one, delivering a near-flawless top-to-bottom performance to take the early lead. <\/p>\n
With several athletes unable to put down clean first runs, the intensity ramped up for the second run of finals where the United States\u2019 Nick Goepper responded with a highly technical run, posting a new leading score of 94.80 to apply pressure heading into the final few drops.<\/p>\n
Melville Ives looked to respond, where he landed a switch left double corked 1440 safety grab, but ultimately, he fell short. <\/p>\n
Fellow Kiwi Ben Harrington also impressed in the same event, making the finals and securing his best result of the season with an eighth-place finish.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Alice Robinson has struggled in the latest giant slalom race at the FIS Ski World Cup event in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia.<\/p>\n
Robinson failed to complete her opening run, which saw her slip to third in the standings, and left her feeling \u201cfrustrated\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cDidn\u2019t have the right feels from the get- go,\u201d Robinson wrote on Instagram.<\/p>\n
\u201dThis is how our sport rolls and I\u2019ll use this fire for the next races going forward. Thank you for the support. We charge on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reigning World Champion topped qualification from his heat and wasted no time making his mark in run…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3017,275,15293,13982,10542,131127,16555,128963,115958,78,103211,110658,3234,111,139,1536,69,5106,14717,74830,6926,8466,121517,213,18835,10706,23644,102,377],"class_list":["post-217336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ahead","tag-canada","tag-continued","tag-continues","tag-cup","tag-finley","tag-form","tag-freestyle","tag-halfpipe","tag-in","tag-ives","tag-melville","tag-months","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-next","tag-nz","tag-olympics","tag-podium","tag-preparation","tag-season","tag-second","tag-skier","tag-sports","tag-strong","tag-teenage","tag-winter","tag-with","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}