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Shred, white and flew.
Innovative American freestyle skiers Alex Hall and Nick Goepper landed jaw-dropping tricks on the Secret Garden slopestyle course and won the gold and silver medals at the Beijing Olympics on Wednesday.
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Hall clinched the gold on the first of three runs when he defied gravity with a trick called "right double 10 pretzel one." He spun 900 degrees one way and, as G-forces took over, stopped the spin in midair and spun 180 degrees the other way. He stuck the landing and skied in backward to the finish, earning a score of 90.01.
Goepper was so impressive on his second run that he clinched the silver with a score of 86.48.
American men have won six of nine medals since slopestyle made its Olympic debut in 2014. Goepper added to his silver from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games and bronze from the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
From left silver medal winner United State's Nick Goepper, gold medal winner United States' Alexander Hall and bronze medal winner Sweden's Jesper Tjader celebrate afrter the men's slopestyle finals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Also up in the mountains, Mikaela Shiffrin set the fastest time in a downhill training session ahead of the Alpine combined, which will be held Thursday. That will be the superstar skier’s fifth event and she’s still looking for her first medal.
Those were far better results than down in the city, where the U.S. men’s hockey team was knocked out in the semifinals of the Olympic tournament when it blew a lead in the last minute of regulation and was shut out in a shootout, losing 3-2 to Slovakia.
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On the slopestyle course, Hall and Goepper were rewarded by the judges for their epic creativity. Hall’s gold medal was the eighth for the United States in Beijing.
"I’m just stoked I did it, my best slopestyle ever — and for the world to see that," said Hall, who was born in Alaska, grew up in Switzerland and lives in Utah.
"With where our sport’s been going, a lot of what we do, we call ‘spin to win,’ and, so, everyone is spinning as much as they can," Hall said. "To take a new approach and do a trick that has almost no rotation but is still really, really hard — it was really, really sweet."
Goepper’s big trick was a new approach at a double-cork 1440.
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"Sometimes big contests are just sort of business as usual and you have to just slog together a run," Goepper said. "This, it felt good to do it how we wanted to do it."
The Secret Garden course has replicas of portions of the Great Wall carved out of artificial snow, and Goepper skied on top of a pagoda-shaped guard house known as The Shred Shed that doubles as a rail section up top.
"I think I had to separate myself in some other way," Goepper said. "And I also thought jumping on top of that house would be really cool."
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