The barcelonan Queralt castellet, which will be one of the main assets of Spain in the next Winter Olympics in Beijing, next February, The snowboarding ‘superpipe’ test corresponding to the Dew Tour, held this Sunday at the US station of Copper Mountain (Colorado), finished second. Queralt, born 32 years ago in Sabadell and who will be Olympic for the fifth time in Beijing, finished second in a test in which the American Chloe Kim – Olympic gold of ‘halfpipe’ won in the last Games, those of PyeongChang 2018 (in Korea del Sur) – and in which the Chinese Xuetong Cai finished third, world champion of the discipline in the World Cups organized by the Spanish station of Sierra Nevada (Granada) in 2017.
Castellet, that he had already secured the podium (and second place) with the 93 points that the judges awarded him in the first round -in which both Kim and his compatriot Maddie Mastro fell, seventh at the end-; He didn’t improve his rating in the second, but he impressed by raising it to 95 in the third. A score that was only improved by the 21-year-old current Olympic champion, who after falling again in the second act, governed the pressure to, in the third round, sign an exercise that earned her 96 points and the final victory. Xuetong Cai finished third, with 89 points, ahead of three Japanese: Sena Tomita (86 points), Ruki Tomita (79.75) and Haruna Matsumoto (73.50), who occupied places from fourth to sixth.
“I am very happy with today’s competition and with this silver that also exceeds my last bronzes in the two previous editions“Queralt commented after finishing second at Copper Mountain.” The idea for today was to have ironed the two ‘back-to-back 9s’ and the 1080 in the lower part of the pipe that had been working for me in training, but the spot was different today and I wanted to secure one last round with these two 9s and a clean 7 at the end, knowing that it was going to be a pretty good round and it turned out very well“added the Catalan ‘rider’ this Sunday in Colorado.