Three Americans looked to crowd the medal stand at the men’s freestyle skiing slopestyle event, hoping that a European-centric field would not disrupt those plans.
Two of them did it: Alex Hall won gold and Nick Goepper took silver on another sunny, below-zero day at Genting Snow Park. Jesper Tjader of Sweden won bronze.
In a competition where only a skier’s best score counted, Hall set a high bar early with a 90.01 score on the first of three runs. When he landed his last jump, his hoot could be heard throughout the finish area.
Everyone else spent the morning trying to make more noise. Goepper came closest, on his second run, scoring 86.48.
All right,” he said when the score popped up. “I’ll take it.”
Each of the Americans in the final arrived with high hopes and a stirring story. Goepper, 27, was looking to complete a full rainbow of medals, having won a bronze in 2014 and a silver in 2018. He has battled alcohol abuse and depression, opening up about his struggles after his 2018 performance in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
In an interview last month, Goepper said that he was glad that other Olympians seem increasingly willing to discuss their mental health.
Colby Stevenson, 24, was in a near-fatal car accident in 2016, late at night on a rural road in Idaho. He spent days in a coma, but recovered to return to the global circuit about a year later. At these Olympics, he won a silver medal in big air, but thought that slopestyle provided a better chance to medal.
Stevenson finished seventh. “Gave it everything I had,” he said after his final run.
The day belonged to Hall. The 23-year-old was born in Alaska but grew up mostly in Switzerland, the son of professors at the University of Zurich. He did not have coaching until he was 16, when he was invited by the U.S. freeski team to train in Utah. For a time, he considered competing for Italy, where his mother is from.
He was 16th in slopestyle at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, just as his career was taking off. He won a World Cup event that year and the X Games in 2019. He was third at last year’s world championships.
“You’ll see him doing a whole bunch of taps and nose butters and creative ways to utilize the course,” U.S. freeski coach Dave Euler said of Hall in December. “He’s a very creative course user.”
The contest was the final showing for the slopestyle course, a standout venue — but a temporary one, made of snow — designed to look like a section of the nearby Great Wall.
Its combination of rails, obstacles and jumps vexed some of the world’s best snowboarders and freeskiers, but also created some memorable moments and stellar Olympic champions from around the world.
Before Wednesday’s final event, the nine medals awarded in slopestyle had gone to athletes from seven different countries.
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott of New Zealand and Max Parrot of Canada won in snowboarding. Mathilde Gremaud of Switzerland narrowly beat China’s Eileen Gu in the women’s version of the freeskiing event on Tuesday.
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