Alex Hall continues to prove himself as one of best skiers with Olympic gold
The Parkite reflects on his success after taking home slopestyle gold in Beijing a month after winning big air at X Games Aspen
Park Record
Gregory Bull/AP
PARK CITY, Utah — Not even Alex Hall knows how he can pull off a double cork 1080 and then spin 180 degrees in the opposite direction right before landing.
Hall landed the physics-defying trick on the final jump of his first run in the slopestyle event at the Winter Olympics last month. His individual style and creativity stood out to the judges, and the run scored a 90.01. That stood for the rest of the event, and Hall took home Olympic gold for the first time in his second trip to the Games.
In an interview two weeks after he secured gold, Hall said he had been experimenting with rewinding spins on 720s and 360s before working his way up to doing it with a double cork 1080.
“It had kind of been something that had been on my mind for a long time but never thought I would be able to get it consistent,” Hall said. “I finally was able to get it decently consistent in the fall. Still haven’t done that many, but I’ve done enough now to where I felt confident enough to try to do it in a run and just stoked it all worked out. That one’s kind of a weird one for me.”
Hall continues to demonstrate that he’s one of the world’s best freeskiers on the sport’s biggest stages. At this year’s X Games Aspen, just one month before the Olympics, Hall spun the first-ever 2160 to claim the gold medal in big air. He also added a bronze medal in slopestyle, bringing his X Games medal tally to nine.
In addition to his individual success at competitions, Hall is doing his best to film skiing clips whenever he can. Hall, who won the gold medal in Real Ski in 2021, tries to do some urban skiing, like when he went to Denver with a few friends post-Olympics after the city’s recent snowfall. Filming these kinds of shots is an entirely different approach than a slopestyle competition — Hall says that some clips can take over 100 attempts.
Hall added that it helps him to be a better slopestyle skier as well. It could be easy to become complacent with winning slopestyle competitions, but filming challenges him in a different way. The goal is to land something difficult, not something that he can consistently pull off.
“You really push yourself mentally, and I think it also pushes your skiing to really think outside of the box, especially with street skiing because you’re trying to ski on features or objects that weren’t designed for skiing,” he said. “I think that’s helped me a ton with my competitive career as well throughout the years and especially this year. I think it allows me to think outside the box when I look at a slopestyle course and kind of push the boundaries in a more creative way, which I think has been a key to my success this year.”
Making it to the Olympics was one of Hall’s goals, but he didn’t put a lot of pressure on himself after that. He even said that it’s just another ski event in a season full of them. However, it’s a testament to how far Hall’s skiing has come in the span of four years.
Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times
The Parkite finished 16th in slopestyle in the Pyeongchang Games as a 19-year-old, but it was the following year that he started to see his competitive career take off. Hall won a pair of X Games gold medals and three World Cup events in 2019. Hall’s been tough to beat ever since.
“It just kind of gave me that confidence I needed, and that just has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “When you’re skiing well and you’re confident, it makes everything more fun. So yeah, I think just having a good time with it has been the best thing for me in terms of doing all these events.”
Hall isn’t the only Park City freeskier to come home from Beijing with a medal, as Colby Stevenson won a silver medal in big air as well. Hall noted that Park City and Utah’s skiing scene as a whole have helped him become the skier that he is today.
“I think it’s just a good place to become an all-around good skier, which I think is a huge element to being a good slopestyle skier,” he said. “I think it’s good to be a really good park skier, but I think if you’re well-rounded and ski powder or street rails or transition or as many kind of aspects of skiing as you can handle, I think that can just massively improve your slopestyle game.”
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