ASPEN — Canadian superpipe ski star Sarah Burke grabbed her third consecutive gold medal at the Winter X Games with a comeback performance on her final run on Friday night at Buttermilk.
Trailing the competition through two runs, Burke nailed her final lap through the superpipe with a 900 to a huge straight air to a left-side 540 to a right-side 540 and closed out the run with a 720, edging out silver medalist and Aspen team rider Jen Hudak 93.33 to 92.66.
“Going into my last run I was like, ‘Come on Sarah you can do this. It is your day,’ ” Burke said. “It all came together and right before I dropped in a bunch of kids at the top said, ‘I love you Sarah.’ It was so cool.”
With a fresh coat of snow covering the mountain, there was some concern about the condition of the pipe. But bronze medalist Jess Cumming said the conditions could not be better. Cumming, a Copper team rider from Edwards, won her first X Games medal in her fourth appearance at the contest.
“I’m really happy to be on the podium,” she said after posting an 84.00 on her first run. “I just really tried to push it and go as big as I could tonight, and the pipe was perfect – big and smooth.”.”
Earlier in the day, Chas Guldemond of Truckee, Calif., was the top qualifier in the men’s snowboard slopestyle elimination with a 78-point run. Shaun White was the last of eight qualifiers for the finals, which are Saturday at 2:30 p.m. The gold medal goes to the best score of eight riders getting three runs each.
