Well-Rested Red Gerard Ready For Snowboarding Season After Whirlwind Olympics

If you’ve seen pro snowboarder Red Gerard compete—or give an interview, for that matter—you’re already familiar with his laid-back, easygoing personality.

But it would be a mistake to correlate Gerard’s mellow nature with a lack of killer instinct. When it comes to contests, Gerard is a fiery competitor—and after the 2021-22 snowboarding season ended on a disappointing note, with Gerard finishing just off the podium in both slopestyle (fourth) and big air (fifth) in February’s Beijing Olympics, the 22-year-old is ready to put the bib back on and find himself atop some podiums in 2022-23.

At the same time, however, an Olympic season, which Gerard has experienced twice now, is high-stress; the pressure can’t help but color every competition.

“I was riding in such a headspace of 100 percent last year, and I’m looking forward to this season maybe toning it back to 70 percent,” Gerard told me on Zoom just before his first competition of the season, the Visa Big Air at the U.S. Grand Prix at Copper Mountain, Colorado, in late December—not far from Gerard’s hometown of Silverthorne.

So while he’s zeroed in on winning while he’s at the top of his game, Gerard is also looking forward to taking a step back in 2022-23, looking around and remembering just why he loves this sport so much.

After he won gold in the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics at 17—then the youngest snowboarder to medal at the Games—Gerard became a media darling.

It was all so unexpected and so overwhelming that Gerard feels like he didn’t even really have a chance to experience the Olympics as they’re supposed to be experienced. He was excited, now understanding the magnitude and significance of the event, to finally have that experience at the Beijing 2022 Games—only for Covid-19 to change the nature of the Games dramatically.

“I was such a stress case in China, getting tested every day,” Gerard said. “I was like, the last thing I want to do here is test positive. That whole experience in China was just way different, so I’m just looking forward this year to going through the season stress-free and focusing on snowboarding and trying to get good results.”

Gerard didn’t find the podium finish he was looking for at the U.S. Grand Prix, finishing 13th in the men’s snowboard big air qualifiers with his backside 1620. Norway’s Marcus Kleveland won the event thanks in part to his massive 1800 Indy and nollie backside 1080 tail grab, with American Chris Corning coming in second with a backside 1800 melon that earned a score of 92.25 from the judges.

Another of Corning’s tricks, a switch backside 1620 Weddle grab—a technical and stylish trick—scored just 80.25, indicating that, like at the Beijing 2022 Games, degrees of rotation may earn heavy weighting in the judges’ minds this year.

It’s something Gerard would like to explore this season. At the Olympics, the men’s slopestyle course—consisting of three jib sections at the top followed by three large jumps—seemed to encourage creativity. The second of the three jumps had two transfer kickers on either side, similar to a jump that riders were rewarded for riding creatively at the 2018 PyeongChang Games (where Gerard took gold).

Gerard’s first run consisting of a technical and stylish rail section followed by, on the three jumps, switch backside 1620 Indy, frontside double cork 1080 Weddle on the kicker transfer and a backside 1620 method was creative, honored the course design and seemed to check all the boxes, but scored 83.25.

That was enough, briefly, for first place, but soon Gerard fell into bronze-medal position and then was bumped off the podium altogether by Canada’s Mark McMorris, whose final run consisting of 88.53 included a backside triple 1620.

There was plenty of chatter about the judging after the event; at the time, Gerard was gracious and honest, saying, “Definitely would have liked to be on the podium—didn’t fully agree with the judging, but that’s okay, that’s the way it goes.”

Speaking now about his experience in China and looking ahead to the 2022-23 competitive season, which will include FIS World Cup events as well as X Games and Dew Tour, Gerard is still forgiving of the judging while also questioning the direction that the sport is headed.

“When it doesn’t go your way you’re obviously bummed, but you can’t really blame [the judges] too much; they sat there and judged 20 to 40 riders that day doing a lot of the same-looking tricks,” Gerard said about the Beijing Games. “For them to mess up on a couple is understandable in a way, but it’s still frustrating when it happens.”

Questions about judging is “a problem snowboarding has kind of always dealt with,” Gerard added.

“When it was lower spins, it was easier judging 720s and 900s on what looks best, and then you get up to 1440s and 16s and 18s and you’re not really judging on what looks best, because in my personal preference none of it really looks good,” he said. “It just looks like a lot. A tornado never looks good.”

So as he puts on the bib again, with one event already under his belt, Gerard plans to try to balance testing out how much emphasis judges are putting on degrees of rotation with staying true to the kind of snowboarding he wants to do—while also playing ball and putting down the kinds of runs he needs to land on the podium.

“I’m trying to do the bigger tricks with different grabs, which makes it a lot harder; trying to put that into a contest would be super interesting,” Gerard said. “And just trying to explore the mind of a judge a little more, and seeing what they like and what they don’t like is what I’m looking for. When the Olympics is going on you don’t really want to play around with that, so this year that’s what I’m really looking forward to. Maybe more people will start doing stuff like that.

“It ultimately just comes down to us as snowboarders coming together and deciding where we want the competition scene to go,” Gerard continued. “Do we want more spins or do we want to tone it back and try to make things look good?”

To scratch that creative itch between the sometimes formulaic competitive season, Gerard has been turning to filming in the backcountry. Gerard had a part in snowboarder Ben Ferguson’s highly anticipated film Fleeting Time, which premiered this fall, and the two are looking to put together another short film this upcoming year—not a full length, but a good edit set to music.

Over Christmas, he was able to decompress with girlfriend Hailey Langland (who just took second place in the Visa Big Air women’s final) and her family in Hawaii—his “first Christmas spent in the sun”—before competition ramps back up.

Some snowboarders begin to tire of the competition circuit and—if they can get the sponsor support—move exclusively to filming. But Gerard isn’t there yet.

“I love that competition feeling right now in my career; I love trying to win, I love winning,” Gerard said. “There’s no better feeling than making it on the podium.”

Next on the docket for Gerard is the Laax Open in Switzerland in January, followed closely by X Games. There are slopestyle events in Calgary and in Mammoth; the slopestyle world championships are in Georgia (the country). The World Cup season ends in March.

In any given year, whether to compete or film video parts, Gerard may travel to Canada, or Japan, or China, or Europe—a constant state of jet-lag. Contests often begin early in the morning, sometimes requiring pre-dawn wake-up calls to get some practice runs in.

Gerard, who counts Burton Snowboards, MTN DEWDEW
, Oakley and Toyota among his roster of big-name sponsors, never realized or placed much importance on the connection between sleep and his performance. But he has been working with smart mattress company Eight Sleep for a little more than a year and has found the partnership to be crucial to his career.

“It’s so cool to see outside sponsors like this come into snowboarding and give the support,” Gerard said. “Everyone needs to sleep well and everyone needs these cool sponsors like this and help throughout their snowboarding careers.”

He attributes the increased focus on good sleep with recovering from jet lag faster and generally better performance on the mountain. Gerard and Langland like to compare their stats and temperature settings. (Gerard likes to go to sleep cold and wake up extra hot—like, 110 degrees hot.)

“I always looked at people who were like ‘I can’t sleep in hotel beds, I can’t make it through the night,’ and I was always kind of like that’s bull crap,” Gerard said with a laugh. “But now I’m enjoying my sleep so much…and just seeing all the stats, I fully have turned into kind of a geek about sleeping now.”

The partnership is fitting, given how Gerard burst onto the scene in the national media. The storyline surrounding his surprise 2018 Olympic gold medal win was that he stayed up late the night before the slopestyle final watching Brooklyn 99, overslept, and then, in his rush to get to the course, lost his jacket and had to borrow teammate Kyle Mack’s.

People loved the story of the 17-year-old snowboarder who essentially rolled out of bed to win gold at the Olympics. But at 22, that anecdote doesn’t fully describe Gerard’s values or personality, and he’s worked to undo that perception.

“To be honest, before that 2018 Olympics I didn’t really take things too seriously. I wanted to land runs and all that but I didn’t have an outcome picture,” Gerard said. “But now as I’ve gotten older I have such a better outlook on snowboarding and what I actually like in competing. I do feel like I’m constantly explaining that, but I don’t really mind.”

“At the Olympics I really sunk my teeth in and liked that feeling of winning, and then after that I noticed how much more I wanted to be an actual competitor—try hard to learn new tricks, go to contests and take it really seriously,” he added.”

To that end, Gerard confirms that he’ll be attempting to qualify for the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games.

“I just want to experience one more; I feel like I haven’t yet had the olympic experience I’m looking for,” Gerard said. “China was hard with Covid; in 2018 I felt a little young and a little clueless. I’d really like to try to go to Italy. I definitely feel like I’m riding the best I ever have right now and it’d be a shame not to go to another Olympics and try to win another one.”

Thanks to a contest Eight Sleep is running, one lucky rider will have the chance to shred with one of the best doing it. With an Instagram or Twitter comment about why they deserved to win, fans could apply to ride fresh powder one-on-one with Gerard. The contest entries closed on December 20 and the winner will be announced in the coming weeks.

“With this contest opportunity with Eight Sleep, I’ve always just wanted to give someone the opportunity to come out and experience my day-to-day life at Copper, because I think it’s pretty cool and pretty unique,” Gerard said.

Some hoped a quippy one-liner would catch Eight Sleep and Gerard’s attention, but many others wrote heartfelt mini-essays about what Gerard and his career have meant to them. Some had suffered life-threatening injuries and found a new love for snowboarding; others were from the same area as Gerard—Summit County, Colorado—and had long followed the local hero.

He may be an Olympic gold-medal-winning pro snowboarder, but when it comes to the time he spends on his board outside of competitions, Gerard gets the most enjoyment riding not with other snowboarders doing double 1620s, but average riders who love the sport and the mountains for the same reasons he does.

“I have maybe even more fun riding with my brothers—who are really not that good, it’s very scary and sketchy going down the mountain—than I do my professional friends,” Gerard said with a laugh. “That’s what I love to do is ride with new people of all sorts of skill who are trying to get better.”