“I hope this holds," U.S. skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle said Tuesday after he finished four-hundredths of a second behind the leader at the Super-G at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
It did, and he captured his first Olympic medal.
The silver medal for Cochran-Siegle, 29, of Vermont, came 50 years after his mother won gold in 1972.
“Getting an Olympic medal is definitely a dream,” Cochran-Siegle said before the competition was over.
Austria’s Matthias Mayer won gold, his second in a row in the event at back-to-back winter Games and his third Olympic gold overall.
Mayer won with a time of 1:19.94 in the Super-G, which is the super giant slalom. Cochran-Siegle had a time of 1:19.98 in his silver medal performance.
Norway’s Aleksander Aamodt Kilde came in third with 1:20.36, winning bronze.
Cochran-Siegle’s mother, Barbara Ann Cochran, won gold in the slalom at the Games in Sapporo, Japan.
“I’m just so proud,” she said in a video interview with NBC during the race. “I knew he was capable. I didn’t know if it would happen, but I knew he was capable.”
The Beijing Olympics are Cochran-Siegle’s second Winter Games; he competed in PyeongChang, South Korea, in 2018.
In January 2021, he fractured his neck in a crash on the Streif course in Kitzbühel, Austria, and had to be transported off the hill by helicopter. He had surgery the next month.
“It’s special,” he said Tuesday. “I think as an athlete you’re always charging and always trying to get better. I think sometimes you can use it as fuel — but just never giving up on yourself.”
The U.S. as of late Monday ET had not yet won a gold medal in the Winter Olympics in China.
