Winter Olympics 2026: Alex Hall may have been dethroned in slopestyle, but he leaves with zero what-ifs

LIVIGNO, Italy — Imagine, if you can, being one of the best freestyle skiers in the world. A former gold-medal winner, even.

And then imagine arriving in Italy to defend that gold medal — in your mother’s home country, no less — and finding a slopestyle course with obstacles so daunting that you were only able to complete the tricks you mapped out one out of 10 times in practice.

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That’s the mind space Alex Hall found himself in Monday night: A champion filled with doubts, but in a way that was oddly freeing him of the burden that came along with trying to repeat what he did four years ago in Beijing.

This was not the competition for Hall to try and strategize or manage his way to the podium. It was full send, from the drop-in to the bottom, leaving nothing in the tank.

“I went to bed just knowing, like, the odds of getting a medal are so slim,” he said. “Because everyone’s so good and the run I was going to try and do, the chances of landing that [were small].”

And if that’s the way things were going to turn out, Hall was fine with it. Because even amongst freeskiers, who are a different breed altogether, Hall is about as laid-back as it gets.

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He just loves to ski, man. The competition brings the medals, the opportunities and the money, but when he won the gold in Beijing with a high-risk, high-reward run that’s now the stuff of legend in this sport, he brought it home and put it in a sock drawer.

Winning and losing? It’s practically the same. In a sport this capricious — one run, judged by people who could never come close to doing what Hall does — you just keep trying stuff and maybe at exactly the right moment it’ll be good enough to win.

“The four years in between [Olympics], it didn’t ever feel like there was a day where I was like, ‘I’ve got to go train so I can get [another] medal’ or ‘I’ve got to go train so I can beat this person,’” he said. “I’m just gonna go ski, and I like skiing, so in a way it felt effortless because you’re just excited to go ski every day.”

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It’s a nice approach to life, isn’t it?

It also turned out to be an incredibly effective approach Tuesday, as Hall backed up his Beijing gold with Italian silver, coming up a mere .53 points shy of Norway’s Birk Ruud, who has been the best slopestyle skier in the world for the last couple years.

“Maybe, in a way, I’m almost more proud of it,” Hall said of the medal hanging around his neck as he made his way through a thicket of interviews. “I’m  really proud of myself for keeping up with how good everyone is nowadays. The tricks people are throwing in slopestyle runs now were big air tricks two or three years ago, so the fact that I’m able to stick with the young guns and put a run down that I’m really proud of is pretty cool. Walking away with any medal is a huge success.”

Of course it would have been storybook for Hall to win a second gold, particularly here. His mother is from Bologna, and he has an Italian passport. He spent much of childhood in Europe, learning to ski just across the border from here in Switzerland where his parents were college professors.

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Of all the athletes wearing the Team USA logo at these Games, no one has felt more at home in these surroundings.

“It feels like a place I know and a place I’ve been in,” he said. “It just feels like another day skiing, in some ways, which is so cool and allows you to, like, really sit back and just enjoy it.”

Which, at its heart, is what freeskiing is all about: Competitors rooting for each other to stomp their runs, land their tricks and let the judges sort out the microscopic, barely perceptible differences between a good performance and a great one.

“In our sport, every event is a different winner,” said American Mac Forehand, who finished 11th. “It’s not consistent at all. Just to get on the podium is huge no matter the event.”

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But it does say something about the 27-year-old Hall that he has come up with some of his best stuff twice now on the biggest stage in the sport.

And coming up half a point short against Ruud, an almost perfect technical skier who generally makes this stuff look way easier than it is?

Hall leaves with zero what-ifs.

“None at all because I knew the run I tried was so hard that I’m surprised I even landed it in three tries,” he said. “When you do one of these runs and it’s that hard, you just black out. You drop in and forget everything you did and end up at the bottom. You don’t really remember how it was. I knew there was a slight mistake in there, but I didn’t know how severe it was.”

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The judges did not penalize Hall much at all, and his score of 85.75 held up as second-best despite 10 other competitors getting a chance to displace him.

“We’re always rooting for each other and always want everyone to throw down their best runs,” Hall said. “The run I threw down, it wasn’t as crisp and perfect as the Beijing run, but in the months leading up to the Olympics I knew if I could get any medal I’d be so stoked. And there’s a lot to be said about just being stoked about how you ride.”