Gerard proves a Colorado boy can fly
Peter Pan won a gold medal, in a fairy-tale ending so surreal even he didn’t believe it.
“What just happened?” snowboarder Red Gerard said Sunday after the diminutive teenager from Silverthorne rose from the bottom on the standings to the top of the Olympic podium in one gravity-defying, snow-stomping, final run that earned him gold in slopestyle.
Ranked 11th of 12 finalists after two runs, Gerard edged Canadians Max Parrot and Mark Mcmorris with a clutch final run that scored 87.16 with the judges and caused the crowd at Phoenix Snow Park to erupt with chants of “US-A!” in celebration of America’s first gold medal of the Winter Games.
Gerard looked at the scoreboard that flashed his name at the top and mouthed the words: “Oh. My. God.”
And no witness to the sudden turn of events was more shocked than a bearded man wearing a Cleveland Browns cap.
“My football team was 0-16, but I’ve still got to represent my Brownies,” said Conrad Gerard, a native of Ohio who moved to the Rocky Mountains to raise a family in Summit County.
When it appeared a windswept course and the pressure of being a favorite for a medal was going to be too much for Gerard, he proved to be golden. And he did the ride of his young life for a very simple reason: Although the world was watching, flying like Peter Pan in the Olympic finals was no big deal for Gerard.
“Here’s maybe what you don’t understand. Red doesn’t know the size of the Olympics …” said the father of America’s newest Olympic hero, “because he’s part of that generation that really hasn’t watched TV, and only knows the stuff on his smartphone. I tried to tell him the Olympics is a really big deal, so you really want to do well in it. And he said, “Ah, whatever.’ ”
At age 20, snowboarding is old enough to know better. But it refuses to grow up. The tradition-bound Olympics can’t tame the sport’s wild heart.
And that’s a very good thing. After all, the biggest thrill in snowboarding is in catching the big air. Gerard is Peter Pan of the terrain park. He is a 17-yearold pixie, in every awesome sense of the word. He stands barely 65 inches tall and is lighter than gravity, at 140 pounds.
His delightful smile is the harmless mischief that keeps a principal’s office busy. Instead of being on a solemn, serious quest for a medal, Gerard showed up at the Winter Games like an accidental tourist, naively insisting: “I honestly don’t know what the Olympics is.” Yeah, bruh.
Gerard is from the school of snowboarding where the ride’s the thing. Yeah, he wants to win, because throwing down a trick that impresses your buds is cool. But, for riders like Gerard, gold, silver and bronze medals are baubles, a largely artificial way for old fuddy-duddies to stamp their own importance on a slopestyle competition they don’t really understand.
But snowboarding is changing. More money means more rules, both properly codified and unwritten. The man is trying to tame the sport’s wild heart and force Peter Pan to grow up.
Way back in 1998, when snowboarders crashed the Olympic party, they were met with an eye roll. Back then, they were crazy, pot-smoking kids, winning medals but flunking the drug test.
Well, well, well. Look how far the sport has come. Approaching legal age, snowboarding is all grown up. And that’s not necessarily a good thing, if you ask me. Snowboarders spin higher than ever, fly upside down into space like astronauts and push the limits of sanity.
But get this: Snowboarders now learn new tricks on giant airbags. The motorcycle rebel spirit has been replaced with a playground-monitor attitude of safety first.
“Which I think is really whack in general and I wish it was banned from snowboarding,” Olympic gold medalist Jamie Anderson said in December, during an interview with The Denver Post. She remembers when tricks were literally built from the ground up, on those powder days of winter, after riders meticulously constructed a launch ramp in the snow. Amen, sister.
That’s how it should be, don’t you think?
It’s that carefree spirit of adventure that Gerard brought to the Olympics. Him worry? No way. The Gerard family doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Heck, his father even misplaced a ticket and almost missed the biggest athletic moment of Red’s life, before talking his way into the grandstands after the first round of the finals.
“I was jerking around with tickets. What can you say?” Conrad Gerard admitted, with a sheepish grin. “So what if I missed the first run, which I did. I just got here a little late. But I saw what counted. And it was surreal. I mean, are you kidding me? My son just won an Olympic gold medal.”
A teenager from Silverthorne did it with a carefree spirit as light as a snowflake, in a manner fellow competitor Sebastien Toutant said properly celebrated a sport in a changing time when “we’ve got to keep the roots of snowboarding.”
Peter Pan proved a boy from the Rocky Mountains can fly.
Never grow up. Never grow up.