Winter paralympics 2022: historic bronze for GB snowboarder Ollie Hill

The rescheduling of events to avoid warmer Beijing weather forecast for the weekend made for a busy Friday at the 2022 Winter Paralympics, with medals available in Alpine skiing, biathlon and snowboarding, and the para ice hockey and wheelchair curling competitions reaching the semi-final stages.

Britain’s Ollie Hill picked up the first ever ParalympicsGB medal in snowboarding. He went into his second run laughing and clapping as he knew his first run time of 1min 10.45sec was enough to have guaranteed him at least the bronze in the men’s banked slalom SB-LL2. With snow conditions deteriorating, like the majority of athletes he could not improve on his time, and so finished third. Sun Qi of China took gold, with Finland’s Matti Suur-Hamari second.

The 32-year-old Hill was making his Paralympics debut, having joined the ParalympicsGB programme in summer 2020 after a below-the-knee leg amputation after a car crash in December 2018. His teammate Owen Pick, who lost his right leg serving in Afghanistan in 2010, just missed out on a historic second British medal, finishing in fourth place in the same event.

After the race Hill told Channel 4: “I didn’t think banked slalom was going to be my thing. It’s my third ever banked slalom.” He won a bronze medal in the same event in the World Championships in Lillehammer in 2021, and added that after that result, where he felt he had made a mistake right at the end of his run, he “kind of thought that there was a little chance in the back pocket that I could pull something out here”.

That gold for Sun Qi was accompanied by a victory for Wu Zhongwei in the men’s banked slalom SB-LL1 on another highly successful day for the hosts. In the two other snowboarding classes contested on