Cooper Woods became an Olympic champion despite various obstacles // Photo: theaustralian.com.au
In the final round, Woods earned a score of 83.71. There was real drama surrounding that medal as Canada’s Mikael Kingsbury scored the same number of points. Kingsbury, who was the 2018 Olympic champion in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was clearly focused on winning his second career gold medal.
Fateful twist
In the end, the fate of the medal was decided by an additional indicator – mastery of turn technique. The Australian athlete beat his Canadian opponent by a tenth of a point and became an Olympic champion for the first time. The third place went to Japan’s Horishima Ikuma, who earned 83.44 points.
Woods might not have made it to the finals because he finished 15th in the preliminary qualifying round. He was forced to go through an additional qualifying round in which he was unbeaten.
Australia at the Winter Olympics
The 25-year-old from Merimbula in southeastern Australia was the first medal won by a representative of the green continent at the Games in Italy. Although Australian athletes have been competing in the Winter Olympics since 1936, they have reached the top of the podium six times in 90 years – Woods was seventh.
The previous time an Australian athlete won the White Olympics was in 2022. Then triumphed freestyle skier Zoe Sadowski-Sinnott. In addition to freestyle, representatives of this country became the best in Olympic competitions in short track speed skating and snowboarding.
The gold medal immediately lifted the Australian team to 14th place in the team medal standings.
