A seventeen-year-old Colorado teenager with the excellent name of Red Gerard took out America’s first gold medal at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, scoring pole position in slopestyle snowboarding.

What makes this feat more impressive is, that — much like Jean-Paul in Seinfeld, who overslept and missed his event at the ’92 Barcelona Games — Gerard had spent the night before the Olympics hanging with his team-mate Kyle Mack, smashing episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix into the early hours.

“Red, you out of bed yet?” Mack asked at 6:20am, twenty minutes after his alarm failed to wake him.

Gerard panicked, ate a quick breakfast (an egg sandwich with ham, avocado, and cheese, according to Yahoo!) then couldn’t find his puffy Olympics jacket so had to borrow Mack’s. He then rushed his way to eventual Olympics victory.

Gerard was awarded a combined score of 87.16 out of 100 for three snowboarding runs, after which he let out a glorious  “holy fuck”, which was captured forever on the live NBC broadcast of the games – which is gold enough for us. Here’s the footage of it.

https://twitter.com/GoBobbo/status/962523309018624000

“I just didn’t really think I knew what the Olympics is,” he told Yahoo! after winning. “I kind of grew up just watching Dew Tour and X Games. I’d never really realised how big it is.”

He becomes the youngest American male medal winner — gold, silver or bronze — in a Winter Games since 1928, as well as the first medalist born after the futuristic year of 2000.

And in case you’re not sold on the seventeen-year-old yet, take this press conference, in which he casually lets the global sports media know his friends and family had been shotgunning beers since at least 8:30am that morning as they staggered their way to the event.

The hero these Olympics needed.

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