Article source: NetEase News
After winning 1 gold and 1 silver in the freestyle ski jumping and slope obstacle course competition at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing once again let the world see her talent. And the last competition she participated in, the U-shaped pool, was the one she was most sure of winning gold.
On the eve of the Winter Olympics, various experts and media have begun to build momentum for Gu Ailing to win gold in the U-shaped pool, and public opinion agrees that the U-shaped pool is the project she holds in her hand, and the medal has been booked by the Frog Princess before the competition has begun.
Why is everyone so confident in Gu Ailing? In the end, it is strength.
People are accustomed to using past achievements to predict the future, which is why many players with experience and in the current year are highly favored. Although Gu Ailing is only 18 years old, she can make the discerning media support her in unison because she has proven herself many times on the world-class stage.
In fact, although the Winter Olympics is the ice and snow sports event that has received the most attention in the world, in addition to assuming the big stage for human beings to challenge the limits of sports, it also shoulders the mission of popularizing and promoting the spirit of sportsmanship, in view of the purpose of unity, fraternity and equality, it is necessary to give many small countries players a special participation quota.
This is especially true of the niche sport of skiing, which, in order to popularize the sport, even forced a number of participants from tropical countries who have never seen snow, which obviously reduces the number of participants in those ice and snow powers, and also reduces the average level of the athletes' skills of the event itself.
Therefore, for Gu Ailing, although the Winter Olympics are also an important event, it is actually not the most difficult stage.
So what is the stage of the highest level of snow sports? It is widely believed that X Games is the cradle of the birth of the Ice King.
X Games is a commercial competition hosted by ESPN, a professional sports media in the United States, which has attracted countless attentions since its establishment and has also created a large number of world superstars in the field of extreme sports.
Because X Games itself pursues a temperament that exceeds the limits, it adopts an invitation system, with the purpose of inviting only the world's strongest players to participate, and the winter players are almost all from the United States, Canada, Norway, Finland and other traditional ice and snow powers, which is an authentic elite players' club.
Gu Ailing won two gold and one bronze at last year's X Games, including the gold medal in the U-pool event.
At the same time, she has been invincible in the U-shaped pool competitions of the past few months: X Games, World Championships, Fluxus Tour Champion, World Cup Race 4-game champion.
Gu Ailing, who was crowned the ski queen in 2021 with the crystal ball symbolizing the best of the World Cup season, is to some extent Michael Jordan of the U-shaped pool.
Interestingly, Michael Jordan has the famous "flu battle", and in last year's World Championship debut, Gu Ailing also had a masterpiece with a hand injury - she easily won the championship without a snow pole.
You know, the World Championships are not a water-injected amateur event, this is the international snow federation to hold a professional competition in importance second only to the Winter Olympics, such a title is enough to show Gu Ailing's absolute dominance in the U-shaped pool project.
Of course, the Winter Olympics is not a "dimensionality reduction blow" for Gu Ailing, although the Winter Olympics are limited by its particularity and lower the threshold, but this is still the touchstone in the ice and snow event second only to X Games.
Although the overall strength of the athletes in the Winter Olympics is not so "rolled", the head players are still the strongest athletes who represent the highest level of ice and snow sports in the world.
For example, Gu Ailing's two Canadian rivals at last year's X Games, Cathy Sharp and Rachel Kack, who won silver and bronze medals, and 19-year-old Estonian talent Kelly Hildaru, all appeared at The Genting Ski Park in Zhangjiakou to compete with her.
The 29-year-old Sharp was a gold medalist in the U-shaped pool at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and also won the X Games championships in Oslo in 2016 and Aspen, California in 2019; the 24-year-old Kack, although he has not won a gold medal, has won several medals at the World Championships and X Games since 2019; Hildaru won the World Championships at the age of 16, and has already won 2 gold and 1 silver in X Games.
With the background of strong enemies, it is more and more obvious that Gu Ailing's outstanding talent and strong strength. Because the freestyle ski scoring rules are not scored individually according to each action like gymnastics and figure skating, but are scored according to the four dimensions of "DAEV" after a round of action is completed - that is, difficulty, amplitude, execution, and variety.
Gu Ailing's opponents have their own shortcomings, for example, at last year's X Games, although Sharp's technical action difficulty is not inferior to Gu Ailing, he can complete the 1080 turn that many people can't do, but the altitude of the air after the jump is obviously insufficient, coupled with the unfortunate injury of the previous attempt at 1260 affects the state; The difficulty of Kak's stability is average, which is why she can always get a medal but no gold medal; Hildaru is all-round but there is no killer skill. And she just missed a full year of competition with a cruciate ligament injury in her knee.
And Gu Ailing not only has no less difficulty than the opponent's movements, but also is at the top level in other aspects. Coupled with her stretched posture and calm self-confidence during the game, Gu Ailing is invincible on the U-shaped pool.
To put it simply, Gu Ailing is a terrifying "quad warrior" who is full of all attributes in the U-shaped pool.
As can be seen from Gu Ailing's several winning matches, the opening two consecutive 900-degree turns, and then with two Alley-opp Flat Spin ending has become her starting style, although the difficulty is not low, but in Gu Ailing here is only a routine operation. As long as this process is successfully completed without mistakes, the champion is a hand in hand.
However, the charm of Gu Ailing is that she is never satisfied with just winning the championship. Constantly challenging her own limits, the pursuit of faster, higher and stronger, is the reason why this 18-year-old girl has charmed countless audiences.
At the final of the Fluxus Tour at the end of last year, Gu Ailing scored 94.5 points after the first round of the trial of the usual operation. At this point, the second-place Estonian Hildaru scored 92 points (the commentary shows that Gu Ailing's two consecutive Alley-opp Flat Spins are a skill that Hildaru has not yet fully mastered), and the other opponent Sharpe is only 81.75 points.
The commentary at the time had already said that it had almost helped her lock in the championship.
But at the same time, the commentator was also worried about whether Gu Ailing would have reservations because he was watching Gu Ailing's game for the first time, and wanted to see if the talent of this talented girl was as gorgeous as the rumors said.
In the end, the narrator got his wish, he said that his worries were just too much to worry about, because Gu Ailing did not stop his steps, and she did not mind bringing more wonderful visual enjoyment to the audience.
Gu Ailing scored 96 points in the second round of increasing difficulty, and even let the commentator exclaim that this was one of the most difficult technical moves he had ever seen in a women's U-shaped pool. And in the third round, Gu Ailing was still trying to challenge higher-level moves, which made the commentators marvel: "Does she want to get full marks?" ”
In the U-shaped pool qualification tournament of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing once again jumped out of the unparalleled 93.75 points and 95.50 points in two consecutive rounds with a crushing momentum, and easily entered the final. When asked by a reporter whether she had "no reservations since the qualifying round", she said: "I haven't been on the difficulty yet." ”
In the final, Gu Ailing once again won a gold medal "only with" the "routine operation" under her own standards, making the game lose suspense from the beginning.
The phrase "You fell before I could shoot" might be the most apt description.
Maybe in the future, Gu Ailing really has a chance to get a perfect score, because last November 6 she posted a video of training in Austria, in this video, people found that Gu Ailing has evolved again - she actually seems to have completed the back-to-back 900 degree rotation to the 1080 degree rotation in the U-shaped pool, and ended with a back-to-back Allie-opp Flat Spin high difficult action!
And this set of big moves at the bottom of the pressure box allows the Frog Princess to open a significant gap with other players on the basis of the original invincibility. At this stage of the competition, Gu Ailing does not even need to use this set of actions to easily win the championship.
There is no doubt that the limits and future of the freestyle ski U-shaped pool project will be defined by Gu Ailing.