Queralt Castellet from the city of Sabadell has made history, winning the silver medal in the halfpipe snowboard event at the Beijing Winter Olympics on Thursday morning. It is the first medal a Catalan athlete has won at a Winter Olympic Games. "I'm overjoyed, I'm very happy; it's been an amazing day; I got the medal. Yuuuhh!", exclaimed Queralt at the end of the competition. It's just the fifth medal won by a representative of a Spanish team in the history of the Winter Games, after those won by Paquito and Blanca Fernández Ochoa, in 1972 and 1992 respectively, and those of Javier Fernández and Regino Hernández at Pyeongchang 2018.
Castellet is 32 years old and these are her fifth Games. To date, her best result had been a seventh place - an Olympic diploma, four years ago - and this morning she fulfilled the predictions that placed her as one of the big favourites to win a metal in Beijing. The Catalan snowboarder, the most veteran of all those taking part, made history by claiming silver in the halfpipe at Beijing 2022, in an event held at Zhangjiakou, in which the top favourite, the US athlete Chloe Kim (21 years old) also came through and repeated the title she won four years ago.
Fifth Olympic participation
Castellet - second in the World Championships at Kreischberg (Austria) in 2015, and third in the last world title event in Aspen (USA) last year, has closed her personal circle of sporting achievements with her fifth Olympic participation. With six victories - and eleven more podiums - in the World Cup; and a gold and two silver medals at the X Games, the champion from Sabadell, the city inland from Barcelona, today tasted success in the only competition which has resisted her: the Olympics. She scored the second best points total, behind US athlete Kim, in the halfpipe test, in which judges give points for difficulty, height, breadth and originality of the tricks performed on a half-pipe track.
Translation of tweet:
"Historic success for Catalan sport at the @ Beijing2022 Games! Queralt Castellet (@q_castellet) wins silver in the halfpipe snowboard event and takes the first medal won by a Catalan athlete at a Winter Games. Congratulations, Queralt!" - Catalan ministry of sport"
"It's been amazing, I started a little badly and then got nervous, but I was able to get the round I wanted in the second round, a round I've been working on for a long, long time. Many years. I'm very happy," said Queralt after taking the silver. The Catalan made an irregular start, scoring no higher than seventh (69.25 points) in the first round. After qualifying in fourth place on Thursday, which decided the twelve finalists, she was clearly in contention, and it was in the second round that she clicked and scored high. That sent her up to second spot overall and she took a well-deserved Olympic silver, the result of many years of work. The third round did not change the final podium of an historic event for the Catalan.
Debut at age of 16
Queralt Castellet was a young gymnast before she 'recycled' herself into snowboarding, and at the age of 16 made her debut, as the youngest of that year's Spanish Olympic team, at the 2006 Turin Games. Since then, her story has been one of resilience: returning from two more Olympic adventures emptyhanded, at the same time as she was progressively making her mark on other snowboarding competitions. Then an Olympic diploma four years ago in South Korea, and finally, Olympic silver in 2022.
Queralt Castellet, during the event / Efe
Perhaps the nearest she had got to the podium was in 2010, at the Vancouver Games (Canada), where she was the Spanish flagbearer for the first time - in Beijing she has repeated the honour, sharing the task with another Barcelonan, the skeleton pilot Ander Mirambell - when she qualified in third place, but after a bad fall when preparing for the final, did not compete for the medals. The road has been long and tough.