You may not know who Alex Hall is, but your friend who is obsessed with skiing surely does.
Hall, the gold medalist in slopestyle skiing at the Beijing Olympics, is just about every skiing aesthete’s favorite skier. In an era when so many skiers fixate on whether the judges will reward them more for a 2,160 rather than a 1,980 (an extra half-revolution), Hall focuses on what jump will best express who he is both as a skier and human. If the judges don’t approve, so be it.
He knows he will sleep better and will have lived how he wants to live — trying cool stuff. He enjoys filming ski movies as much as he likes competing and winning medals.
Hall, 26, will try to win some more medals this weekend at the X Games, and then, if all goes as planned, at the 2026 Olympics in Italy in a little more than a year. Expect the unexpected. His winning run in Beijing involved going over a mound on the snow that wasn’t supposed to be a part of the actual jump that everyone else went over. The reinterpretation of the course could have cost him severely but ended up rewarding someone who invariably thinks differently. He needs to.
Hall sat for a lengthy interview in New York City in October. Below are excerpts, which have been edited for clarity, that reveal an athlete on a journey of discovery, about his sport and himself.
•My whole dad’s side of the family is super into skiing. They’re from Salt Lake City, and he grew up doing pretty much freestyle skiing as a kid, before it was a thing. Late ’70s and ’80s. There was a bunch of videos of him and his friends, old videos — I think Super 8, maybe — skiing like going off jumps before they had terrain parks or any of the stuff. Natural jumps kind of in the powder.
I watched those videos growing up. Every time we’d go over to my grandparents’ house for Christmas, he’d pull out the tapes, we’d watch them. I thought it looked really cool. My mom’s super into skiing, too. That’s how my dad and my mom met. My brother’s a big snowboarder, so we did it all growing up together. That was like our family activity every weekend. I was never in a program or on a team.
• I grew up in Switzerland from age 1 until 16. My parents are teachers at the University of Zurich. I grew up skiing on some local mountains near Zurich, like a 45-minute drive away. There are some bigger mountains that are further away from where I live, maybe two hours away, that are pretty famous for freestyle skiing, but I was just with my friends skiing powder, building our own jumps.
Sometimes it would snow and I had some rails that I built in my backyard, so I practiced a lot. There’s a big hill right behind our house. None of the neighbors cared that I put a bunch of rails on it as long as I cleaned it up as soon as the snow melted. I’d ski after school for a couple hours till it got dark and then I’d bring out the light. My friends would come over and we would just ski on the rails for five hours. I always kept it fun and never felt too serious skiing with them because it wasn’t like we were in this crazy challenge trying to be professional athletes.
• I moved alone at 16 to the U.S. to go to high school and train. I kind of went with the mindset of I would ski as hard as I could for the next two years, then kind of see where I got. The year I was graduating from high school, I made the pro team. I went to the Olympics in 2018 when I was when I was 19, but I didn’t do great (he failed to qualify for the slopestyle final). Then it took off.
For me, racing was almost never in the picture. This mountain in Switzerland, Laax, has a great halfpipe, but I was always scared of them. Slopestyle felt like the natural progression for skiing the mountain with my friends and and doing flips off little jumps and stuff and practicing on the rails. A big part of it was just an inspiration from my dad watching him do all the videos of tricks and stuff when he was younger.
(Hugh Carey | AP) Alex Hall of the United States checks the score following his run in the slopestyle finals, Friday, Dec. 17, 2021, during the Dew Tour freestyle skiing event at Copper Mountain, Colo.
• A big part of our sport is self-expression because pretty much what we’re doing is a series of tricks that we think are cool and we hope that the judges will also score well. Everyone always says our sport is so free and so open, but there’s set parameters, there’s still expectations to be met in terms of judging criteria.
My first couple of years competing, I did feel like I was trying to meet those parameters in a more traditional way, and I felt like just trying to do whatever I could to check the boxes and it wasn’t really working out for me too well. The last couple of years, I’ve been the most successful because I’m just doing pretty much exactly what I want to do.
• That run at the (2022) Olympics, a lot of people, including my coaches, advised me not to do it because they thought it was too outside of the box. Whenever you do something really outside of the box, you never know what you’re gonna get.
That was the peak of me just following my gut and my instinct of what I wanted to do. My heart is not to care about what other people will think. It’s hard to do because I’m competitive. Just sticking with my gut and for it to work out and win an Olympic gold medal with my own twist was very rewarding.
• Rails and jumps are built to be ridden a certain way, but they don’t always have to be. When I approach a course now I show up and I think, “OK, how can I do this differently than what everyone else is gonna do?” How can I maybe instead of going on the normal rail, I’ll go from a different rail and then try and jump onto the other rail and use the course in a way that no one else is.
At the Olympics, the mound was more there as an aesthetic. It wasn’t really there to be ridden. It completely opened the box of what I could do on the course. Guys are doing these really technical tricks off a jump where I’m doing something maybe much more creative off just a mound. I didn’t really have any other good trick ideas for the traditional jumps.
• Filming is so different than competing. Filming is so much more kind of figuring out a big puzzle on your own. I do it with a completely different set of friends. There’s so many random and crazy places you can go to film. We’ve filmed in the Cottonwood Canyons in Utah a bunch, but then I’ve been to Japan multiple times to film there.
You’re still experiencing new things. We actually went on a filming trip in the Midwest. We went to Iowa, Minnesota, pretty random places where you never expect to ski, but we were doing a thing called urban skiing, which is where you pretty much slide down handrails that are built for pedestrians and jump off walls and buildings.
I would never travel to those places for a World Cup or X Games or the Olympics.
• I’m the kind of guy I think who would get burned out really easily if I didn’t do both. So doing both is a great balance. When you’re filming, you learn certain tricks that you can then try in competitions and vice versa. They really complement each other.
The trick I did in my Olympic run was actually a trick I learned the spring before on a filming trip. In an event, you only have a couple practice runs and you have two or three runs to do your tricks, and so you really don’t have that many tries to land. On these urban and street trips, we’ll try and slide down big rails and do tricks on big rails and some of these tricks will be over 100 attempts just to get the trick because you want to be as perfect as you can.
The filming is where you’re really pushing the boundaries of your skiing.
• I’m taking two classes a semester at the University of Utah. There’s been times where I have a homework assignment or a test due the night before I’m competing at X Games, so it’s pretty funny. I was gonna do business but it was a little dry for me, and I think I am really interested in it because I deal with a lot of that stuff.
In a class setting, it wasn’t super inspiring, so now I’m studying environmental studies, which I’ve always been kind of drawn to. As a skier, you kind of have to be. It’s your livelihood. You used to be able to ski all summer in Europe, but now you can’t ski until October because they have to shut the glaciers down all summer.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
