LIVIGNO, Italy — Needing to erase his first jump of the night and pair a strong score with his second round 83.50, Red Gerard pointed his snowboard forward and, from atop a ramp standing roughly 170 feet high, plunged downward toward his final jump on the opening night of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Gerard took off, spun four and a half full revolutions in a backside direction while holding the board (a backside 1620 mute) and landed cleanly. He smiled and tossed a fist through the air. The crowd surrounding the base of the jump cheered.

Gerard would need a strong score, something in the 80s, to have a chance of advancing to this weekend’s men’s snowboard big air finals.

The score flashed: 72.00.

Gerard shrugged, shedding indifference like snow powder off the shoulders.

Probably because he didn’t want to be there much in the first place.

“I am not a fan of big air at all,” Gerard said later Thursday night at Livigno Snow Park. “Honestly, I don’t understand why we’re forced to do this. I don’t like to do this. It’s not what I enjoy to do.”

At this point, Gerard has little time for an event he’s not passionate about. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

It’s all the result of a longtime wonky defect in Olympic snowboarding. Slopestyle, an event requiring a series of rails and jumps in a variety of sizes and shapes, and big air, an event featuring one big jump off an enormous ramp, are tethered. Want to do one? You have to do the other.

Even if it makes little sense.

Even if athletes specialize in one and are barely competitive in the other.

Can some do both and thrive? Yes.

Can everyone? No.

Back to Gerard.

The 25-year-old is a top American snowboarder. He has been since winning the 2018 gold in slopestyle in PyeongChang. More recently, he’s won X Games gold in slopestyle each of the last two years. For good measure, he’s twice finished second in big air in World Cup competition, but, at this point, he has little time for an event that he’s not passionate about.

“If I wasn’t forced to do this, I wouldn’t do it,” Gerard said, looking over to a scoreboard winding down with competitors, eventually settling with him finishing 20th out of 30 and missing the finals.

Gerard says it’s true in the reverse, too. If a rider specializes in big air and doesn’t feel like doing slopestyle, why are they expected to do so? It’s not as if a 100-meter sprinter in the Summer Games is also expected to run the 1500m.

“This is no dig on anyone who does (big air),” Gerard said. “Everyone that does this sport are badasses that are precise and very good at the sport, and I look up to those guys. It’s just not my gig.”

The topic has been a sticking point among snowboarders for years, ever since slopestyle was introduced to the Games in 2014 and big air was added in 2018, when the two were sort of lumped together. Gerard said he hopes this will be the last Olympics that uses combined entrants. He has said all of this before.

Which is why, begrudgingly, he found himself Thursday atop the enormous man-made jump currently towering over Livigno. The structure is built upon scaffolding, an erector set among the Alps, and lit by floodlights for night-time competitions.

“I’m not too fond of having a scaffolding jump when there’s a mountain right here that we could be doing it on naturally,” Gerard added.

The jump is extremely steep and features a particularly small landing area.

Gerard didn’t much like it. Others, mainly those who are here to compete for big-air gold, did just fine.

Ollie Martin, a 17-year-old from Wolcott, Colo., is the lone American advancing to Saturday’s final, finishing ninth among the 12 qualifiers to make it out of a field of 30. Japan claimed four of 12 spots in the finals, including Hiroto Ogiwara, who finished top among all qualifiers. Chinese star Su Yiming, the event’s defending gold medalist, advanced for a chance to defend.

Americans Jake Canter and Sean FitzSimons joined Gerard in failing to make it out of qualifying.

They’ll now wait for men’s slopestyle. It begins Feb. 16.

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