Russia's American wins double gold
Russia's American-born snowboarder Vic Wild completed an historic double at the Winter Olympics in Sochi on Saturday by claiming parallel slalom gold.
Wild had already won the parallel giant slalom title on Wednesday and the 27-year-old insisted his off-season training had made the difference.
"All those power drills I did in the summer, they really paid off. Nobody could keep up," said Wild, who was born in Washington state and married Russian snowboarder Alena Zavarzina.
In the qualification and elimination rounds he was a second quicker than the others while he was almost two seconds faster than his last-16 opponent over the two runs.
But his real moment of brilliance came in the semi-finals against four-time world champion Benjamin Karl from Austria.
Wild made a mistake on the first run meaning that he was hit with the maximum deficit of 1.12 seconds ahead of the second run.
But he produced a startling run to claw back all that time and more to steam into the final.
There he was pushed all the way by Slovenia's Zan Kosir but won by 0.11sec.
Karl added Olympic bronze to the silver he won in Vancouver in 2010 in the parallel giant slalom by beating Italy's Aaron March.
In the women's competition, Austria's Julia Dujmovits was a shock winner.
The 26-year-old overturned a huge 0.72-second deficit following the first run to beat Germany's Anke Karstens by just 0.12sec following the second.
It was the first time she has ever won an elite level parallel slalom race.
"I don't know what to say, I'm just so happy and thankful," she said.
"I have had a lot of injuries, (I tore) my ACL (cruciate knee ligament) twice (but) I just never gave up. To be Olympic champion today is amazing."
Amelie Kober of Germany narrowly held off charging Italian Corinna Boccacini to claim bronze.
