The blustery conditions on an otherwise sun-splashed morning sent Red Gerard tumbling into the snow on each of his first two runs during Sunday’s men’s slopestyle final at the Phoenix Snow Park, leaving the American teenager ranked 11th out of 12 finalists with one final chance at salvaging his Olympic dream. It’s all he would need.

Pressure be damned, Gerard propelled his wraith-like 5ft 5in, 116lb frame into the crisp mountain air once and again, drilling trick after gravity-defying trick with the marriage of imagination and technical precision that embodies the snowboarding discipline at its highest caliber. As he contorted mid-air to punctuate the gold-clinching run with a backside triple cork 1440 – three twists and a flip – a solitary thought ran through his head.

“Just don’t blow it,” the 17-year-old recalled with a smile. “In the air I was like, ‘Come on, let’s put it down here, let’s not ruin it on the last jump.’”

The positively clutch performance earned the highest score of the day with an 87.16, enough to hold off Canadians Max Parrot (86.00) and Mark McMorris (85.20) for the gold, nudge the favorite Ståle Sandbech of Norway off the podium and capture the United States’ first medal of these Winter Games. By putting a period on the biggest run of his career with the biggest trick of his life, America’s newest Olympic hero delivered a fitting culmination of a journey that started in the Cleveland suburbs a decade and a half ago, continued in a Colorado backyard and ended on Sunday halfway around the world in the Taebaek mountains of South Korea.

Now the easygoing teenager with the endearingly perpetual bed-head is the youngest snowboarder ever to medal at the Winter Olympics, the youngest American man to win gold in 90 years and the second-youngest man to top the podium in any individual event after Finland’s Toni Nieminen, who was 16 when he won the individual large hill event in ski jumping in 1992. He is the second straight American to win the men’s slopestyle after Sage Kotsenburg, the champion when the event made its Olympic debut four years ago.

“Crazy, to be honest,” Gerard said in the aftermath. “I cannot believe it. I’m shaking right now, maybe from the cold, or from the excitement, I don’t know. But I’m ecstatic, I can’t believe I got to land my run. Just to land a run would have been plenty for me and to get on the podium, but to get first is crazy.”

Red Gerard smiles after winning gold in the men’s slopestyle final at Phoenix Snow Park on Sunday morning. Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP

The sixth of seventh children and the youngest of five boys growing up in the Ohio suburb of Rocky River, Gerard took up snowboarding aged two to keep up with the pack. As the siblings’ interest in the sport deepened, the family decided on a trial move to the Colorado ski town of Breckenridge at the foot of the Rocky Mountains when Red, short for Redmond, was 10. Within a few years the Gerard boys started constructing a makeshift terrain park in the family backyard.



“It started out with a few rails and then over the years it got bigger and bigger,” Gerard recalled. “Eventually we got a rope tow and now it’s just a full-on rail set-up. It’s pretty fun to have some friends over, have a little barbecue and hang out.”

Gerard credits the backyard for fostering a sense of comfort on the rails, which paid early dividends when he burst onto the scene as a 15-year-old with fifth-place finishes his Dew Tour and US Open debuts. He’s taken a step up in last year with a string of favorable results in Olympic qualifiers, including a first-place finish at the US Grand Prix in Snowmass last month. But he insists snowboarding, for him, is less about trophies more about having a good time. (“I honestly don’t know what the Olympics is,” he said in a pre-Games press conference, without an ounce of artifice. “Clearly it’s big, everyone is here. For me, it’s just another contest.”)

The breezy, carefree attitude is a product of his family, who traveled en masse to Pyeongchang and offered deafening support at the foot of the mountain throughout the competition despite frigid conditions that would lead to the cancellation of the ladies’ slopestyle qualification in the afternoon.

“It’s really fun having the whole family here,” he said. “They definitely don’t take things too seriously. They’re a big-time party group and they’re cool to have around. They keep the nerves low.”

Gerard can make even more history when he competes in the men’s big air on 24 February: no snowboarder has ever won multiple medals at a single Games, much less one who’s yet to graduate from high school. He’s less certain about his long-term competitive future: right now Beijing 2022 is the furthest thing from his mind.

“Find myself in three years and see where I’m at,” he said. “I try not to think too far into the future, I’m kind of a day-by-day kind of guy. After this I want to go film snowboarding pretty badly and just take two years to do that and regather myself and see what I’m into. I really enjoy doing contests, too.”

It showed on Sunday, when he came up huge in the biggest of them all.