The "best friends" who won mixed aerials team gold for Team USA

"It was an out-of-body experience today," Ashley Caldwell told Olympics.com after being part of Team USA's first gold-winning mixed aerials team in freestyle skiing.

Caldwell, her boyfriend Justin Schoenefeld and Chris Lillis pulled off something of a surprise to beat favourites China to the title and claim USA's fourth gold medal of Beijing 2022.

China had been the early pacesetters in both finals 1 and 2, with the Americans qualifying for the medal deciders in second.

But Lillis always felt USA had something in reserve and could overtake the home team.

He said, "In that first round, we had a lot more to give as we qualified in second and [it was] mostly my fault that I put the hands down just a little bit.

"But we knew we had a lot more to give going into that last round and it was just going to come down to executing it. Luckily, we all did that."

Lillis certainly played his part by executing an incredible five full twists and three full flips with maximum difficulty.

But the biggest moment fell to Schoenefeld who made the most important jump of his career to take USA to their winning final score of 338.34.

"I haven't stopped smiling for like 30 minutes and my cheeks are starting to get sore, but it's seriously the greatest feeling," Schoenefeld enthused. "I just won the biggest competition in the world, especially with two of my best friends.

"I'm dating my teammate, Ashley Caldwell, and we've been together for a couple of years now. And Chris Lillis, we lived together growing up when I was on the development team and we've just all trained together and been around each other for so many years now. We've just become such good friends now."

Caldwell added: "Aerials is an incredibly difficult and scary sport. I've always said this, that at the top of the hill we know what each other is going through and that builds a bond.

"We have so much mutual respect for everyone on the hill. And [we’ve] never really had a lot of team events. So this has definitely built a different atmosphere. It's very fun."

Team USA's togetherness will be helped by the fact that competing for a place on an Olympic podium is new territory for all three of these athletes.

Caldwell is the only one of the three who has participated in the Games before this year, though she never ranked higher than 10th in Vancouver, Sochi or PyeongChang.

That lengthy pursuit of Olympic success only makes things sweeter for Caldwell, who adds: "I'm incredibly proud and honoured and [it’s] surreal to do it on my fourth games. I've been on the hunt for this for a long time and to do it with two of my best friends is incredible."

Lillis echoes what his teammates feel about working together: "We've always had a really good chemistry up on the top of the hill. So it was a great team to be up there."

When asked about working with two people in a relationship, he responds that it's "the best third wheel I’ve ever been a part of".

Considering he now has an Olympic gold medal draped around his neck, that's not too surprising.