Outdoor Living
ARS 308 Jaclyn Steidle Article 01 1
AIMING HIGH Red Gerard’s Rise to the Top COLIN BANE Before Red Gerard’s improbable rise to the top of the Snowboard Slopestyle podium at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, before his hard-partying family and headlines like “Teen Olympian Overslept, Lost Coat, Said F*ck on TV, and Won U.S.’s First Gold of 2018” made him an overnight celebrity, before comparing notes with Jimmy Kimmel on shotgunning beers, before Donald Trump called him to the White House lectern by the name “Redmond,” before he called the president “Dude,” before all that, there was Red’s backyard in Silverthorne. Red, still just nineteen years old, is the sixth of seven children in the Gerard family. He was born in Cleveland, but the family started spending winters in Colorado when he was seven and became full-timers a few years later. In 2012 the Gerards bought a house in Silverthorne, and Red says the move may have marked the moment his destiny was first carved in snow. The Gerard clan — older brothers Brendan, Creighton, Trevor, and Malachi, and older sister Teighan — promptly set to building a makeshift terrain park behind the new family home. They even installed a rope tow, powered by an old 50cc Honda dirt bike engine. Their parents, Jen and Conrad Gerard were fully supportive from the beginning; after all, they’d moved the family to Colorado to fulfill their own dreams of living in the mountains. Red spent hours every day in that backyard, and Malachi, a budding
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Above: Red Gerard (Photo by Visit Almaty) 3
AIMING HIGH Profile On Red Gerard
filmmaker, began shooting video to document the youngster’s exploits on the rails and jumps that would shape his early snowboarding career. Today Malachi is Red’s personal filmer and has co-directed several feature-length snowboarding films. The Gerard backyard also helped launch Trevor’s career in the snowboard industry; he’s done stints on the sales teams at Snowboard, Transworld Snowboarding and Snowboarder magazines and Fallen Footwear. Now the youngest Gerard, eleven-year-old Asher, is a fledgling snowboarder, and Red has been excited to pass down his love of the sport in the same way his older siblings did for him. “The setup changes from year to year, but we typically have one long down bar, an up rail, a waterfall drop rail, a couple of corrugated tubes,” Red explains.
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Red doesn’t want to overstate it, but those backyard roots definitely put him on the
The Gerard clan - promptly set to building a makeshift terrain park behind the new family home.
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right path and into the right mindset for approaching big contests and everything else that comes with a pro-snowboarding career: “It’s really pretty mellow, but for me, it was a place to go out and play around with new tricks and just have fun with friends and my family,” he says. “I’ve done pretty well by remembering that’s what it’s all about.”
Red used the backyard park and the nearby Summit County ski resorts — Copper Mountain, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Arapahoe Basin — as a springboard to the contest scene, beginning with regional Rocky Mountain Series events under the umbrella 4
of the United States Amateur Snowboard Association (USASA) while he was still a kid and building up to the USASA Nationals at Copper Mountain. In February 2014, at age fourteen, he bumped up into the International Ski Federation (FIS) amateur circuit; in March 2015 he took fourth place in slopestyle at the FIS Junior World Championships in Yabuli, China, then moved into the 2015-2016 winter season. By the time the qualification process for the 2018 Winter Olympics was underway, Red was on a tear, winning FIS World Cup slopestyle events at Mammoth Mountain in California, and here in Colorado at Snowmass to assure his spot on the U.S. Olympic Team. But no one could have predicted where Red would go from there. Looking back on his Olympic gold medal run in PyeongChang and everything that followed, Red says he’s amused that the world got a fairly accurate representation of him and his family. Between his parents, siblings, and cousins, the Gerards were rolling eighteendeep in South Korea, beers in hand in every photo taken of them, partying from dawn to dusk and beyond. It’s entirely true that Red stayed up late watching Brooklyn 99 on Netflix the night before his big contest, that he slept in on the morning of the final because of it, and that he managed to lose his officially issued U.S. Snowboard team jacket somewhere along the way and had to borrow a much bigger jacket from Kyle Mack, his roommate, and teammate, for the final. It’s true that his cousin was in the crowd waving a bright-orange sign that said, “We’re here to get GERARDED.” It’s true that he was in the last place coming into his last run, opting for a unique line casually showcasing his calm, almost sleepy style. He landed a big, fully extended frontside air over a hip feature, stomped a triple-cork 1440 on the final jump, and ended with an all-the-way-laid-out carve at the base, as if he could barely believe he’d made it to the bottom. It’s true that he said “Holy shit” on the live broadcast as his score was announced, and
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I’ve done pretty well by remembering that’s what it’s all about.
“ Left: Red mentally preparing for a run (Photo by Dane Deaner) Right: Red’s favorite board (Photo by Lidiia Piven)
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that Red or someone else in the Gerard entourage exclaimed “What the fuck!” as the cameras captured them celebrating together. You can take the Gerards out of the backyard, but you can’t take the backyard out of the Gerards. It’s true that he hopped on a thirteenhour flight to do the full media circus back in the U.S., leaving his family to party in PyeongChang without him while he did a whirlwind talk-show tour before flying back for the big-air competition, in which he finished fifth. It’s also entirely true that, when it was all over, Donald Trump couldn’t resist an unscripted moment with Red at the White House reception for the U.S. Olympic Team. “He must be a wild guy. These snowboarders are a little wild,” Trump began. “Where’s Redmond? Where’s Redmond? Come here. Oh, I know this guy!” Red blushed mightily as he walked up to meet the president, and mightier still when the president asked him to “say a couple of words.” Red found himself at an uncharacteristic loss, and replied, “Dude, come on, you can’t put me on the spot like this!” Trump seemed happy with that. “See, he was more nervous here than he was when he was doing the flips,” he said. “I didn’t really understand or appreciate how big of a deal the Olympics was until I was right in the middle of it,” Red says now. He grew up on X Games dreams, Dew Tour dreams, filming in the backcountry dreams, playing in the backyard dreams, not Olympic dreams, and kidding-around-with-the-president dreams. “If I could do it all over again, my one wish is that I’d had more of a chance to take it all in because it all happened so quickly. It was there and then it was over.” Dozens of the world’s top pro snowboarders have made visits to the Gerard family’s DIY setup in Summit County over the years, and next month, Red will bring the concept to the public through a new partnership with Woodward and its parent company, the POWDR Corporation resorts group, which also owns Copper Mountain, where a new
terrain park branded as Red’s Backyard will open at the Center Village base area. The park was actually his mother’s idea. “It’s kind of been me and my mom’s project: We wanted to do something that’s all about giving back to the community that has been so supportive and still in the spirit of what we were able to create in our backyard,” Red says. “The coolest thing is it’s going to be free entry: You basically just sign a waiver and you’ll get to hike the park. We wanted it to be accessible to anybody who wants to try to learn some tricks on a snowboard. I’m beyond psyched that it’s all coming together pretty much exactly how we wanted it, and that we get to do it at Copper Mountain. I’ve been riding Copper and going to Woodward at Copper for as long as I’ve been riding in Colorado.” Woodward, originally an action sports camp founded in Woodward, Pennsylvania, now boasts action-sports destinations in eleven locations across the country, including two in
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Above: Red just having a little fun on the mountain (Photo by Evgenia Kirpichnikova)
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He must be a wild guy. These snowboarders are a little wild
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Colorado: Woodward Copper and its indoor facility, known as the Barn, celebrated a tenyear anniversary in April, and Eldora began adding Woodward-branded terrain parks and camp offerings after POWDR Corp. acquired the ski area in 2016. “I’ve known Red for a pretty long time, and always have to stop and remind myself he’s only nineteen,” says Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson, senior vice president of youth development at POWDR. “He seems like such an old soul, remarkably talented physically, with so much focus and physical skill, and he’s also an engaging, chill, conscientious kid who’s mature beyond his years.”
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I didn’t really understand or appreciate how big of a deal the Olympics was until I was right in the middle of it
Gunny, as he’s known throughout the snowboard industry, is the former president of Snow Park Technologies (SPT), the company responsible for designing and building terrain parks at Copper Mountain and the competition courses for major events like the X Games, Dew Tour and Burton U.S. Open. He worked closely with Red and the SPT team on the design concept for Red’s Backyard at Copper Mountain, which will be a free hike park located between the American Eagle and American Flyer chairlifts, with a rail garden and jib features suitable for riders of all ability levels. “Red has had a long relationship growing up around and riding at Copper, and training indoors there at Woodward, learning aerial awareness on trampolines, but he’s also had this homegrown backyard park at his family’s house in Colorado that a lot of his friends have been able to come and hang at,” Gunny says. “Obviously, he can’t invite the entire world to come ride his backyard at his actual house, but we thought, ‘Maybe we can bring the
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