Red Gerard's journey back to the top of slopestyle

Six years ago, when 17-year-old Red Gerard burst onto the international snowboarding scene after qualifying for the 2018 Winter Olympics, he barely realized the enormity of his accomplishment.

"I'm really happy to watch the hockey games, to be honest," he said in 2018. It was his first press conference as a member of Team USA, and he was asked what he was looking forward to about his upcoming trip to PyeongChang. Surrounded by fellow rookies on stage in Mammoth, California, Gerard's approach to his achievement seemed almost blase compared to his teammates, who could all pinpoint when their Olympic dreams began.

"We kind of just do these contests all year long," he said. "You know, it's an Olympic year - so it's just kind of a bonus at the end of making it."

Gerard wasn't intentionally indifferent. It was just that he'd grown up idolizing a different pinnacle. "Going into this - I always grew up watching X Games, Dew Tour, U.S. Open, and all of that," he said in PyeongChang.

After becoming the youngest American man to win an individual Winter Olympic gold medal when he topped the podium in slopestyle, he expressed a new sentiment in his press conference: "I think I'm starting to get how big the Olympics is."

While he's certainly added to his resume in the intervening years - he returned to the Olympics in Beijing in 2022 - one thing has evaded the snowboarder until now: obtaining his childhood definition of snowboarding success. That's to say, an X Games gold medal. But in January, in his eighth appearance at the annual event, Gerard finally checked that off his list.

This time, it was resilience that got him there.

"My mentality changes every year," Gerard says. "That (first Olympic) year, my mentality was more just like, 'I just want to land runs, and just have fun, and be a part of this awesome process that I'm in traveling around the world.'"

But at some point, he lost touch with that easygoing approach. "Back when he was 17, he didn't really know the magnitude of the Olympics and how big of a deal it was," his dad Conrad says. "That made it easier in a way."

Once that naivete wore off, the anxiety set in. "I used to get really stressed out at contests," Gerard says. "China was a really exhausting one for me," he said of his trip to Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics. "With all the COVID tests and just being a part of going to China and doing all that and so many contests back to back, I really just needed to take a break." Gerard placed fourth in men's slopestyle in Beijing, missing the podium in his title defense.

So Gerard went back to the basics. He largely took the 2022-23 season off from the contest circuit. Instead, he journeyed deep into the backcountry to film with his brother Malachi and girlfriend Hailey Langland, a fellow Team USA athlete.

"It helped a ton," Gerard says. "It was something I needed." At 23, Gerard is already a snowboarding veteran, and that's changed his dynamic when it comes to competing. "I'm not an old guy; I don't think of myself that way at all," he says. But there's been a shift since he came on the scene, and he can feel it.

"When I was a rookie, it was us young guys trying to keep track of the old guys," he says. He feels the pressure from the opposite side these days. "Now, it's the older guys trying to keep track with the young guys. That's the biggest difference right there."

That's why he felt it essential to take a season to reconnect with his love for the sport instead of constantly striving to outdo himself or someone else. "You need that kind of stuff to keep this from not getting old," his mom, Jen, says. "It can get hard. It's so exciting when you're young, you're growing up, and you're moving up. But, it's a little more of a job now than it was when he was 17 years old and making his way up," she says, noting that his rise to fame following his first Olympics was challenging at times.

"It's not always quite as fun, you know? It can be more work and more pressure and all of that because now you are expected to do well," she says.

Gerard returned to contests at the start of the 2023-24 season, making it onto the podium with a third-place finish at the FIS Style Experience Snowboard Big Air World Cup in Edmonton and following that up with another World Cup third-place finish in big air at the end of 2023. In his main event, slopestyle, he placed sixth at a World Cup event in Switzerland in January.

"Now that he's older, he knows how big of a deal it is," Conrad says. "For him to get (a podium finish in) the big air contest… gives him the confidence to move on from that."

"Now I really just try to just take it back a notch and be part of the process and just, you know, whatever kind of happens happens," Gerard says. "I just try to be a little bit more mellow now on myself. I think I find it works a little bit better for me. I feel way, way, way more re-energized and way happier to be back at contests and doing this and kind of pushing it a little bit more."

That trust in himself, combined with the baseline he regained in the backcountry, proved to be what he needed. In the slopestyle finals at the 2024 X Games in Aspen, he landed an 1800 in all three runs and edged out Canadian Mark McMorris by one point overall to secure the gold.

"It's everything," Gerard said on the broadcast after the win. "Today was just so perfect."

For Olympic fans watching Gerard's career from afar, it might have seemed inevitable that he'd find his footing in slopestyle again, but that wasn't the case from his perspective. That's one thing that hasn't changed for Gerard in the years since his underdog gold medal. He still doesn't take any accomplishment for granted.

"Snowboarding is such a surprise thing," he says. "We're doing the craziest tricks and doing such big, big, big maneuvers that, when you land, you're just like, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't believe everything just worked out.'"

Jolene Latimer is a features writer at theScore.