Alex Hall knows what’s supposed to scare him, same as anyone who makes their living launching themselves off the side of a mountain at 40 miles an hour, spins a half-dozen times while he’s 30 feet above the earth, then lands backwards on a pair of skis that are 90 millimeters wide.
One slip and he could break half the bones in his body.
But that fear faded in him years ago, like it does for most world-class skiers. Hall relishes the risk and spends his winters chasing it, from handrails on snowy sidewalks in the Midwest to unmarked ramps in the Olympic Games. What he wrestled with early in his career was something more insular: the weight of expectations. He was afraid to fail. Hall thought it was his job to keep the judges happy, to smile and nod and ski the routines everyone else wanted him to ski.
“I was doing everything I could to check the boxes,” he says.
The higher he climbed, the emptier he felt. The rigidity never fit.
The son of two college professors, Hall grew up in Switzerland, teaching himself to ski on the hill behind the family’s home in Zurich. He’d set up a light in the evenings so he could sneak in more runs after dark. He’d weld old street poles into rails so he could practice his jumps. He’d invent a new move on the trampoline, then test it out on snow, falling more times than he could count. He didn’t have a coach until he was 16.
The sport for Hall became pure expression, an outlet to unfurl his creativity. After he turned pro, he felt that slipping away. All he was doing was copying his competitor’s tricks.
Finally, he said enough. He was done doing it their way. He needed to tinker. To experiment. To improvise. He needed to ski like a kid again.
He did, and his career took off.
“The biggest difference now is it doesn’t feel like work,” Hall says, hinting at the obvious: It never should have.
Hall competes in slopestyle during the 2022 Beijing Olympics, in which he won gold. “I got to do it once,” he said. “If I get to do it again, that’d be amazing.” (Xiao Yijiu / Xinhua via Getty Images)
One could make a credible case that the 27-year-old, among Team USA’s brightest stars heading into February’s Winter Olympics in Italy, has carved out an idyllic counterculture existence. He’s a professional athlete unburdened by the crush of celebrity or the trappings of success. He skis not for medals or prestige but his own self-satisfaction. When he’s not competing, his guilty pleasure happens to be scrolling Google Earth for rails he can mount and slopes he can scale, typically with his best friends, who trek with him by van (of course), film every second (of course), and crash with him in crummy motels along the way.
He’s the defending Olympic champ in freeski slopestyle. He keeps his gold medal inside a sock drawer in his bedroom.
He might be the most successful ski bum on the planet.
“I get the vast majority of my inspiration from him,” says seven-time World Cup podium finisher Hunter Hess, one of Hall’s closest friends. “For Alex, it’s not about sponsors or money or pretending to be something he’s not. He’s the man, and everyone knows it. Maybe he doesn’t even know it.”
“Alex is a different breed of human,” adds Owen Dahlberg, the videographer who tags along with Hall and Hess on their trips. “He just loves skiing, hanging with his homies and f—ing around.”
Hall found happiness in letting go, in measuring success not in results but his own enjoyment. It’s a rare perspective amid the unforgiving world of professional sports — even rarer is the world-class athlete willing to admit as much.
“I ski outside the box,” Hall says. “I don’t do it for anyone else.”
His medal from Beijing rarely comes out. When his parents suggested storing it in a safe, he shrugged. “I don’t see why anybody would steal that,” Hall told them. His sponsors include the chic Italian luxury brand Moncler. He recently modeled for Vogue in London.
Hall won his 13th and 14th X Games medals this week in Aspen, Colo., tying an all-time record in skiing and sending him to the Olympics on a high. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
But he’s most in his element, friends say, inside Dahlberg’s Chevy Savana cargo van, the one with a dining room chair strapped to the wall and soured by the stench of ski boots and empty Heineken cans. The group’s first film, “MAGMA,” became a sensation in the underground ski community, piling up a quarter-million views on YouTube. Three sequels, and a handful of sponsors, have followed.
Hall craves both, he says, the rush of competing with the world’s best one weekend and the freedom of filming with his buddies the next. While most skiers take a few weeks off around the holidays — their only extended break during a grueling six-month season — Hall uses it to scratch his backcountry itch. Last winter, the crew drove 32 hours after a World Cup event, logged hundreds of hours of footage and skied every slope they could find, hitting Calgary, Toronto, the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota.
“We’ll go anywhere there’s six inches of snow,” Hall says.
Most days, they’ll ski for 10 hours straight before calling it quits. Hall or Hess will attempt a trick hundreds of times before getting it right. (Dahlberg says one stunt took eight hours to complete and lasted just four seconds in the film.) During breaks, while most in the group grab a quick sandwich, Hall will wander off alone, hunting for rails or park benches or mountainsides to attack. “He’s the type of guy who just can’t sit down,” Dahlberg says. “Even when we have a day off, and everyone’s resting, he’s on Google Earth the whole day.”
It was actually on a filming trip 11 months before the 2022 Beijing Olympics that Hall first toyed with the move that would clinch his gold medal: a right double-cork 1080 bring-back. The diciest maneuver is the final one; just before his third mid-air rotation, Hall effectively halts his momentum and spins back the other way, like he’s suddenly changed his mind midair. Then all he has to do is land it.
The move had everything Hall wanted: it was innovative, aesthetic and, most important, hard as hell.
Then, a month before the 2022 Olympics, at the Winter X Games in Aspen, he shied away from using it, knowing if he failed to pull it off, he’d likely tumble from the podium. His gold in Big Air that day offered little solace. Hall skied scared, and hated himself for it. “Still not proud of that medal,” he admits.
He flew to Beijing resolute to do it his way, podium be damned.
Then came the decision that would define his second Olympics. The slopestyle course offered two ramps three-quarters of the way down the hill; a third sat tucked between them, but the snow wasn’t built up and the lane wasn’t even marked. Hall knew if he unleashed his right double-cork 1080 off that ramp, and somehow landed it, he’d have a chance at gold.
It was a massive gamble with a medal on the line. The snow was patchy. Hall’s coaches advised against it, urging him to consider a backup plan. Thirty-one other competitors skied that hill in the Olympic final. Not a single one chose the middle ramp.
Hall did.
Then he landed his 1080, pumped his ski poles and collapsed on the barrier after his run was complete, head in hands, overwhelmed by what he’d just pulled off. His final two runs were immaterial. He’d clinched gold his first trip down.
“It was a risk,” he says. “But that’s the skier I’ve always been.”
He attempted a similar trick in the Big Air event, didn’t land the jump, finished eighth and smiled anyway. “That’s the beauty of it,” Hall says. He left Beijing without an ounce of regret.
Skiing his way has made Hall one of the United States’ most accomplished pros — not to mention one of the best freeskiers ever. To date, he’s won 14 Winter X Games medals, seven of them gold. He’s also the first to land a 2160 in competition. That’s six full rotations in the air.
A decade into his career, Hall now fears something else, something in his mind that’d be worse than tumbling off a ramp at the Olympics or not living up to outward expectations: restlessness. Tedium. The idea of sitting inside while the snow is falling and the powder’s fresh.
He knows this much about himself: He has to move. He has to tinker. He has to experiment. He has to see where his instincts take him next.
But first: Italy and his third Olympic Games.
“I don’t feel like I’m trying to defend it,” he says of his 2022 gold. “I got to do it once. If I get to do it again, that’d be amazing.”
Nothing wrong with another medal for the sock drawer.