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Alex Ferreira left it all in the pipe in Sunday’s U.S. Grand Prix finale — including his skis.
The Aspen resident, after settling for a silver in X Games last Saturday, waited until his last run of Sunday’s finals to climb into first place, clutching up to take another World Cup gold medal in an intensely competitive men’s Freeski Halfpipe event.
“There’s no better feeling as an athlete than to know that, when your back is 100% against the wall, you can put it down and put it down at a score in the high 90s, which is, even on people’s best days, an incredible score,” Ferreira’s coach Elana Chase said. “He didn’t try to do it with, like, adding a trick or something a degree of difficulty higher or changing anything, just trusting yourself to just ski better and execute better to win.”
Ferreira, the second-to-last athlete to drop in on each of the three runs, watched as Nick Goepper held a commanding lead through the first two runs, scoring a 94 while only one other athlete reached the 90s (Birk Irving in his second run scored a 91). Ferreira himself crashed on his first run before putting up a respectable 87.5 in his second run that still had him on the outside looking in. That all changed in the last run, when four athletes before Ferreira’s turn put down scores in the 90s, not including Irving, who didn’t improve on his second run.
It was such a high-level stretch of runs that Finley Melville Ives, the only skier other than Ferreira to land two 1620-rotations in a run, didn’t even climb into the top three after an effort that sent the Buttermilk base crowd into a frenzy. (The young New Zealander expressed displeasure with the judges’ scoring.)
Irving, who held second place after two runs, fell all the way to seventh when it was all said and done.
“I would say that was the most stacked competition I’ve seen,” Chase said, adding that she’s only missed one major competition in the past 25 years. “More than X last week. … They had time in the pipe, and then it’s the perfect temperature, perfect day, some bright sun but not real sun, so everything about it was like, ‘If you can’t do what you’ve been practicing for the last year today, you can’t do it.’ So everybody was absolutely just throwing down and it was heavy.”
Before dropping in for the last run, Ferreira found himself in a distant sixth place in the scoring. But in the do-or-die situation, in his last run of nine total across X Games and World Cup, he put down a stratospheric 95.75 in front of the home crowd, dropping the mic on a 1620 double cork with a capped tail grab.
“The mentality was all in,” Ferreira said. “I’m putting all my poker chips all on red. Just give it my absolute best. … I feel like I executed it fantastic. I skied really well and I landed high, grabbed all my grabs, and wow, life is good.”
That all-in effort included his skis, given that he broke not one but two pairs in the event. Ferreira’s assistant coach Taylor Seaton noticed as he was lining up for his third run that his skis had broken during his second one, and they did a hot-swap while he was in the gate, ready to drop in. The replacement skis then died as heroes as he stomped his last trick on his final run, the martyrs of a gold medal.
Alex Ferreira won a gold medal in the World Cup and a silver medal in the X Games in his home halfpipe in the span of eight days.
Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
It put the pressure on Goepper — who won X Games gold last week and has gone back-and-forth with Ferreira this season — to, in his last lap, find a way to improve on his first run that had already impressed the judges more than any other run.
Goepper went for a second 1620 in a run for the first time all day on his third trick and couldn’t stick the landing, giving Ferreira the win. Goepper stuck in second place, securing his third medal of the World Cup season, and Matt Labaugh, a 21-year-old out of the Vail Ski and Snowboard Club, secured his first World Cup medal with a bronze. It marked the second U.S. Ski Team podium sweep of the season.
Aspen’s Tristan Feinberg, competing in his first finals of the season, looked to be putting down a solid run in his first turn, but just barely lost his footing on the landing of his last hit. He got his run down in the second turn through the order, scoring a 59.75, before he fell on his second trick of his last run, looking to go huge and join the 90-point party.
For Ferreira, the victory puts him firmly in the driver’s seat for the halfpipe Crystal Globe, with 360 points on the season. Canada’s Brendan Mackay is in second place with 259 points and Goepper is third with 240. The highest scoring American at the end of the season will earn an automatic bid to next year’s Olympics. Only one competition remains this season, to be held on Feb. 14-15 in Calgary, Alberta.
Ferreira collected his 11th World Cup gold medal and 19th overall. Four of those medals — including another gold at Copper — have come this season. It capped a successful stretch at home in front of his family, friends and fans.
“There’s the benefit of being at home and enjoying it and knowing all the people and then there’s the curse of having to make everybody happy and smile and having all the pressure in the world on you,” Ferreira said. “But it looks like I can rise to the occasion and I’m very grateful for that.”
Great Britain’s Zoe Atkin won her first FIS World Cup gold medal since 2019 on Sunday, scoring the only 90-point run in the women’s skiing Halfpipe finals.
Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
In the women’s Freeski Halfpipe finals, Great Britain’s Zoe Atkin topped a World Cup podium for the first time since December 2019. She posted a 90 flat on her first run which stood the test of the competition. China’s Fanghui Li took silver and Canada’s Amy Fraser took third. Svea Irving, a Colorado native, just missed the podium in fourth place.
Earlier in the day, Canada’s Francis Jobin led the men’s Snowboard Slopestyle podium, joined by China’s Yiming Su in second place and the U.S.’s Sean Fitzsimons in third. On the women’s side, New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott claimed gold in a carbon-copy podium from X Games a week ago that also saw Japan’s Kokomo Murase take silver and Great Britain’s Mia Brookes take third.
World Cup week in Aspen continues this week with qualifications on Tuesday (ski) and Wednesday (snowboard). The finals are on Thursday, starting at 10 a.m. and scheduled to run through 2:30 p.m. Attendance is free at Buttermilk, and the competition will be livestreamed on Outside TV.