China's 17-year-old snowboarding sensation should have won Olympic gold but didn't because scorers missed an error from his rival, head judge admits

• China's Su Yiming won silver in the men's snowboard slopestyle Monday, but he should have won gold.
• That's according to the competition's head judge, who admitted he missed an error by the winner.

The chief snowboarding judge at the Winter Olympics admitted his team made an error that ultimately cost China's teenage phenom Su Yiming a gold medal in the men's slopestyle final.

Iztok Sumatic, the judge, admitted the mistake in an interview published Tuesday on the snowboarding-news site Whitelines but said he couldn't change the past.

In Monday's final, Max Parrot won the gold medal with his second run, which received a score of 90.96, while Su ranked second with 88.70.

But during Parrot's championship run, the Canadian made an error, grabbing his knee instead of his board during a trick.

The error should have been penalized by the judges, according to the competition's rules, but they failed to spot it.

Speaking with Whitelines on Tuesday, Sumatic said the error was made because he and the rest of the judging team did not request a replay of the incident.

"We are entitled to have a replay wherever we think something went wrong. Just to scrutinize it a little bit more," he said. "We didn't get it. We just had this camera angle that they gave us and it looked clean.

"Basically, we judged what we saw. And what we saw was a grab and a well executed switch frontside 16 — from the point of view of a camera that we were given.

"Everything Max did was super clean and super good. Like I said, we judged what we saw and everyone felt confident with it.

"This was the angle we were given on that. And whoever watched it from that angle, almost every single person — if he or she was being honest — would have said that's a good execution."

Sumatic went on to admit that the final scores were wrong as a result of the judging error and that Su should have won gold.

"I read an article by one of your colleagues on Whitelines where he compared it to Maradona scoring the Hand of God goal in Mexico '86," he said. "It was like that. The referee hadn't seen it, but he made a decision, and you can't change it afterwards."

During a quarterfinal match against England at the World Cup in 1986, Argentina's Diego Maradona handled the ball into the net to open the scoring. The illegal move was missed by the referee, and Argentina went on to win the game and eventually the title.

"It's live scoring — we have to score from the live feeds," Sumatic said. "That was the angle we were given, and it felt like a legit trick from that point of view."

Judging errors aside, Parrot's victory on Monday was a heartwarming one.

The 27-year-old was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a rare form of cancer, in late 2018, which caused him to take almost a year off the sport.

After 12 rounds of chemotherapy, he announced he was cancer-free in July 2019.

"It feels amazing," he said after his victory.

He added: "So much went by in those last four years. The last time I was at the Olympics, in Pyeongchang, I got a silver medal, and then I had to go through cancer. It was a nightmare — it's so hard to describe what I've been through.

"You have no cardio. You have no energy. You have no muscles. To be back out here, at the Olympics, on a podium again but with a gold medal, it feels amazing."