Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Top Moment of the Day – 18 February: Ailing Eileen Gu clinches historic freeski halfpipe gold

There is action every day at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 but we’ll select for you the best one at the end of the competitions, when Beijing is closing its doors. Today: Ailing (Eileen) Gu takes halfpipe gold to rewrite Olympic freestyle skiing history.

Ailing Eileen Gu shed tears of joy after dominating the women’s freestyle skiing halfpipe on Friday (18 February).

The biting winter winds that whipped around the Secret Garden superpipe in Zhangjiakou could not stop the 18-year-old American-born skier from adding halfpipe gold to her Big Air gold and slopestyle silver behind Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud.

A superb first run for a score of 93.25 would have been enough for gold. But she improved to 95.25 on her second run to take an emphatic win from defending champion Cassie Sharpe (90.75) and her Canadian teammate Rachael Karker (87.75).

With the world watching, Gu put on a masterclass in her favourite event to become the first athlete to win two freeski golds at the same Games.

Her three medals is also a record with Big Air making its debut at the Games.

"I’m a three-time medallist. That’s crazy,” Gu told Olympics.com after the event.

"It has been two straight weeks of the most intense highs and lows I’ve ever experienced in my life,” she continued. “The second I landed the last 16 [1620] in Big Air, I knew my life was never going to be the same.

“Even then I would never have imagined that I’d walk away with another silver and another gold.”

Though Gu has been taken aback by her results in the Chinese capital, there is a sense in which they were already written in the stars.

Two years ago, at the Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympic Games, the teenage sensation won Big Air and halfpipe gold and slopestyle silver, just