Armour: Red Gerard was oblivious to Olympic pressure
Games aren’t even Gerard’s top focus
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – Red Gerard was as surprised as anyone when Sage Kotsenburg won the first Olympic gold in slopestyle four years ago.
He’s pretty sure people are having the same reaction to him now. Heck, even he’s having a little trouble believing he’s the Olympic champion.
“I’m just mind blown,” Gerard said Sunday after giving the USA its first medal of the Winter Olympics, just as Kotsenburg did in Sochi. “I can’t believe everything worked out, and honestly I don’t think I’ve really had time for it to set in yet. I’m just so happy I got to land a run, and just to end up on the podium is awesome.”
Maybe there’s a lesson in that wideeyed wonder for other Olympians.
In so many sports, the Olympics is the pinnacle, a siren that will hold an athlete spellbound for his or her entire career. There might be world championships or World Cup events, but it’s the Olympics that make icons out of ordinary athletes.
That isn’t the case with snowboarding, disciplines such as slopestyle in particular. Snowboarders don’t grow up wanting to stand on a podium and hear their anthem play. Two decades after snowboarding was added to the Olym- pic program, riders are still more enticed by the idea of doing even cooler tricks and shooting videos in the backcountry with their friends.
Asked if he could see himself going to multiple Olympics, Gerard gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“I’m a day-by-day kind of guy,” he said, sounding very much like the 17year-old he is.
“I want to go film some more (snowboard videos) pretty badly. I’ll take two years to do that and then regather myself and see what I’m into.”
It’s not that the Olympics don’t mean anything. It’s that they don’t mean everything. And therein might be the secret. Over the years, plenty of athletes have crumbled under the weight of the Olympic rings. They’ve worked so long and sacrificed so much, and the magnitude of it all is simply overwhelming when it finally arrives.
But Gerard was oblivious to that. He’s said often over the past week that he hadn’t really understood how big the Olympics were until he arrived. In his mind, the Games that mattered have always been the X Games.
When a guy with glasses and a German accent congratulated him after the event, it wasn’t even clear if Gerard realized it was Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee.
“He’s in that generation that really hasn’t watched TV. It was always smartphone stuff,” said Gerard’s father, Conrad. “So he didn’t really watch the Olympics.”
Gerard wasn’t quite the dark-horse Kotsenburg was when he won four years ago, having won two of the qualifiers for the Olympic team. But slopestyle is still dominated by Canadians and Norwegians, and there were plenty of both in the final.
Rather than obsessing over gold, Gerard’s only concern was putting down a great run and having fun while he did it. If that happened to put him on the podium, all the better.
“I looked up to Sage a lot because he comes into things just trying to have a lot of fun, and that’s how I come into things, too. Just having fun,” Gerard said. “All I really want to do is land runs when I do contests. After that, it’s up to the judges.”
His approach seems so simplistic, almost to the point of being naïve. But Gerard is a product of both his sport and his generation. The priorities of snowboarders are different. So, too, the interests of teenagers.
By not making the Olympics too big, Gerard rode off with the biggest prize there is.
“He’s in that generation that really hasn’t watched TV. ... So he didn’t really watch the Olympics.” Conrad Gerard Gold medal winner Red Gerard’s father