After a day of adjustment, on January 2, Beijing time, the Chinese freestyle ski U-shaped venue national training team ushered in the first match of 2022, in the second women's final of the World Cup held in Calgary, Canada, 18-year-old Gu Ailing won the first championship of 2022 with 92.80 points, 19-year-old Zhang Kexin and 18-year-old Li Fanghui ranked 5th and 7th respectively. This is the first time since the first final on December 31, 2021, that three Chinese players have reached the World Cup final.
There are four World Cups at the freestyle skiing U-shaped track this season, with one stop left after two races at Copper Mountain in the United States and Calgary in Canada. At present, in the real-time ranking list, 4 women and 3 men in China have met the participation requirements of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and the four women will have the familiar Gu Ailing, as well as Zhang Kexin, Li Fanghui and Wu Meng, who are ranked 1st, 6th, 8th and 17th in the real-time Olympic qualification list.
Compared with the snowboard U-shaped field project that began to form a team in 2003, the freestyle skiing U-shaped field project was not long in China, and after the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics freestyle skiing U-shaped venue was listed as an official competition project, the national training team was officially established in 2016, through cross-border cross-project selection, when the average age of the team was only 15 years old, but the overall progress of the project was relatively fast, especially for female athletes.
In the 2017-2018 Freestyle Ski U-Field World Cup, the then 15-year-old Zhang Kexin ranked third in the total world cup points in his first adult season, and won a crystal medal. In 2018, Zhang Kexin can already complete two consecutive 900-degree backwards in the competition, and the difficulty reserve enters the sequence of world-class female players. Zhang Kexin has been continuously achieving breakthroughs for this project in China for a long time. At the 2018 World Youth Championships, Zhang Kexin won the third place, and at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, she reached the final for her first time and finally ranked 9th, but has already made history.
Zhang Kexin at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Photo/; Lu Lin
In addition to Zhang Kexin, Li Fanghui, born in 2003, has also made significant progress, and the youngster began to participate in senior group competitions in the 2018-2019 season, a year later than Zhang Kexin. At the 2019 World Championships, Li Fanghui finished 5th with 80.20 points, and Zhang Kexin ranked 8th, which is the first time that a Chinese player has ranked in the top eight in the world championships. At the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics, Gu Ailing's victory was impressive, in fact, Li Fanghui was the person standing next to Gu Ailing, and she won the runner-up in that competition.
Entering the Beijing Winter Olympic cycle, with the emergence of Gu Airing and the progress of Zhang Kexin and Li Fanghui, China has shown good overall competitiveness in the women's event of freestyle skiing U-shaped venues. The three World Cups that have been played this season, Tongshan Station is Gu Ailing and Zhang Kexin joining hands to enter the final, and the two games in Calgary are Gu Ailing, Zhang Kexin and Li Fanghui who have reached the final consecutively. In the Fluxus Tour in the invitational format, Gu Ailing, Li Fanghui and Zhang Kexin also entered the final.
In fact, not only Gu Ailing, Zhang Kexin, Li Fanghui three, the current freestyle ski U-shaped field national training team, there are Wu Meng, Zhang Ziyi, born in 2002, Liu Mengting, born in 2004 and other young players have a certain strength, young them also have potential to tap. At the Beijing Winter Olympics, both in terms of the number of participants and the final results of the competition, the women's event of freestyle skiing U-shaped venues is expected to achieve a breakthrough.