{"id":277310,"date":"2026-02-10T18:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/277310\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T18:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:44:08","slug":"winter-olympics-2026-luca-harrington-takes-bronze-in-freestyle-slopestyle-to-become-fourth-kiwi-medallist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/277310\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Olympics 2026: Luca Harrington takes bronze in freestyle slopestyle to become fourth Kiwi medallist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only Ruud was left to ride after sitting first from an opening effort of 86.28 and was able to have a victory ride to complete a low-scoring final in tricky conditions.<\/p>\n

Harrington said he had the self-belief despite failing to complete a clean run on his first two attempts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t even describe it. This has been a childhood dream. I didn\u2019t think I was going to make it after those first two runs. We didn\u2019t have the best light out there. But I stood at the top of that last run and put a smile on my face and just embraced what an honour it was to be standing up there with fellow athletes and teammate Ben,\u201d Harrington told Sky Sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just didn\u2019t want to play it safe. I wanted to leave it all out there on the course. I did that. To believe I\u2019m wearing an Olympic bronze medal right now is pretty surreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BronzeBronze medallist Luca Harrington of Team New Zealand poses for a photo during the medal ceremony following the Men’s Freeski Slopestyle Final on day four of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

It is the third straight Winter Olympics that New Zealand has claimed multiple medals, after Sadowski-Synnott took silver yesterday in Big Air<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Harrington kept his composure after promising two runs with costly errors. On his second run he crashed the landing on a switch right triple and was slow to get up at first but eventually walked off the course. He picked himself up and on his final run was able to stick the landing on the switch right triple which secured bronze.<\/p>\n

Harrington was \u201cfreaking out\u201d after two failures to open the competition.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a tough moment for me. For me, it\u2019s pretty rare, I don\u2019t land two runs so that was definitely a shock. Luckily we have a third run here at the Olympics. I was definitely freaking out a bit. I didn\u2019t know what to do whether to change the plan or to keep it going. I had that time to grieve for a moment and get back into the zone. Managed to pull it off.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday was a battle, we didn\u2019t get perfect conditions but that\u2019s part of our sport \u2013 we had to battle through that. I was feeling a lot of pressure, a lot of crazy emotions going on being here at the Olympics \u2013 being in the finals and wanting to do everyone proud. I did not land my first two runs which made that ever tougher \u2013 but on that final run took a step back, embraced the moment and managed to gain that confidence and go through my full run a clean. I\u2019m extremely proud of that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Barclay opened with a strong 69.40 but came off the rails early on his second and third attempts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only Ruud was left to ride after sitting first from an opening effort of 86.28 and was able…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73986,2246,6726,3390,32126,5904,3232,128963,71,145066,78,48746,194,685,101,58138,26019,94586,111,139,69,5106,146023,213,1120,61,698,23644,102,35111],"class_list":["post-277310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-11th","tag-2246","tag-become","tag-best","tag-bronze","tag-final","tag-fourth","tag-freestyle","tag-from","tag-harrington","tag-in","tag-jumping","tag-kiwi","tag-last","tag-left","tag-luca","tag-medal","tag-medallist","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-olympics","tag-slopestyle","tag-sports","tag-takes","tag-to","tag-until","tag-winter","tag-with","tag-zealander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277310","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=277310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}