‘Perfectionist’ Porteous lays down halfpipe marker on eve of Beijing 2022

Nico Porteous, the freeski halfpipe sensation from New Zealand, is a man for the big occasion.

Far from shrinking under the bright spotlight, or falling victim to last-minute jitters, the 20-year-old high-flyer threw down a massive final run to seal gold and close out the final event of the 2022 X Games Aspen in style.

The result was his second gold medal in the space of a few weeks after winning the U.S. Grand Prix in Mammoth Mountain. it also sets the PyeongChang 2018 bronze-medallist up as one of the favourites to top the podium at next month’s Beijing Olympic Winter Games.

Double-gold on road to Beijing

“I’m speechless right now. I can’t even say what it means to pull it off with the last run,” said Porteous, who edged out American Aaron Blunck (silver), who wowed the crowd with five double-cork tricks in a single run, and David Wise (bronze) -- the USA veteran who’s the only man to win freeski halfpipe gold at an Olympic Games (Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018).

“The crowd is so amazing and this just means so much to me right now,” added Porteous who, skiing alongside his older brother Miguel, cemented his second straight Aspen X Games gold with a switch double-cork 1440 and back-to-back 1620s in one of the best runs ever seen in a freeski halfpipe.

And while the mounting pressure was no problem for the young Kiwi in Colorado on Sunday, the spotlight in Beijing will burn even brighter in just under two weeks' time. But far from the "the boy" he says he was in 2018, the "young adult" of today isn't one to rattle at the first sign of pressure.

“I just have to put that external pressure aside and focus on going out there and doing my absolute best and putting the right kind of pressure on myself,” Porteous, who became New Zealand’s youngest Olympic medallist at 16 years and 353 days of age at PyeongChang 2018, told Olympics.com in a recent interview.

Sunday’s competition in the Aspen superpipe saw some of the best halfpipe skiing of all-time.

Top-spot of the ‘jam session’ style event changed hands time and again. But Porteous’ final run seemed to carve out a whole new level as he combined smooth style, total technique and a huge level of overall difficulty.

Best efforts for perfection

“I think if you work as hard as you possibly can and you don't take any shortcuts, then you're going to be happy,” he said of how he’s preparing for the Beijing Olympic Games and how he'd define success on personal terms. “Because you tried your absolute best at the end of the day to be perfect."

“I am a perfectionist. I like things to be the way I want them to be,” added Porteous, whose countrywoman and fellow 20-year-old Zoi Sadowski-Synnott also had a message-sending weekend in Aspen with gold-medal performances in snowboard slopestyle and big air.

“If I can envision it, if I can have the vision in my head of myself doing it, then I want it to be exactly that way in which I imagined it,” he went on.

On the strength of his weekend skiing in Aspen, it wouldn’t be out of order for the youngster to start envisioning Olympic gold.