KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — The snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg is not someone to hold big ambitions or make grand plans. Before winning a qualifying event last month that helped send him to the Winter Olympics in slopestyle, he had not won a snowboarding competition since he was 11.

“A megadrought,” he called it.

And when he stood at the top of the course at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday, he was not sure which tricks he would attempt. The one that mattered was one he had never attempted.

“I just kind of make things up,” he said.

It was just another way that Kotsenburg, 20, is playfully different from most of his competitors, who have spent all winter perfecting runs that they imagined for months. And now Kotsenburg, from Park City, Utah, stands apart from the rest for the most unexpected of reasons. He has a gold medal, the first of these Games and the first in the debut of snowboard slopestyle in the Olympics.