Red Gerard celebrates landing his winning run in men's snowboard slopestyle at X Games Aspen 2025
Red Gerard became a household name overnight in 2018 when he won slopestyle gold at the PyeongChang Olympics—making him the youngest American Olympic snowboarding medalist.
But what did anyone really know about Red Gerard—then only 17 years old? The story that he overslept the morning of the Olympic final and lost his jacket was widely circulated—but it wasn’t even true. It perpetuated an image of Gerard as nonchalant and lackadaisical. And while he is an easygoing person, he is also a deeply driven competitor.
Perhaps people knew that Gerard was sponsored by Burton Snowboards and MTN DEW. But in 2025, that’s also no longer true.
In October, Arbor Snowboards stunned the industry when it announced it had signed Gerard—who had been with Burton for 15 years—to its pro team.
After PepsiCo acquired Rockstar in 2020, it began moving its action sports focus out of its MTN DEW brand and over to Rockstar, which in January 2024 announced Gerard to its pro team.
Now 24, Gerard has had two major sponsor changes in as many years. He has a second Olympics under his belt and is looking ahead to a third. He’s become proficient in the backcountry, opening up an entire new career in filming. And he’s riding better than ever.
That’s what you need to know about Red Gerard.
Red Gerard prepares to drop into a run during the men's slopestyle competition at X Games Aspen 2025
With a silver-medal finish at the Laax Open in mid-January, Gerard came into X Games Aspen looking to defend his 2024 slopestyle gold.
X Games has long been one of the competitions that’s most important to Gerard, but a gold medal had always eluded him—until last year.
This year, Gerard and the rest of the competitors had a new competition format to feel out. Ahead of launching its new year-round league in 2026, X Games instituted a new structure in which the athletes in any given discipline first compete in a playoff, with the top-scoring athletes (four or five, depending on field size) moving on to a final.
In the playoff, Gerard showed off his stylish rail tricks and mastery of the jumps—initially going switch backside 1260, frontside 1440 and backside 1800—to advance to the five-rider final.
Red Gerard competes in men's snowboard slopestyle at X Games Aspen 2025
There, he and Mark McMorris entered into a battle for gold. Ultimately, Gerard edged past McMorris with a run that scored 92.66, upping that first jump to a switch backside 1620. McMorris took silver for his 24th Winter X Games medal, the most all time.
After the competition, his second consecutive gold medal hanging around his neck after chasing that goal since his X Games debut in 2017, Gerard couldn’t stop smiling.
His new Arbor board—which he and his new team dialed in with product testing over the fall and winter—was riding great. Soon it will be available as his signature board, the ultimate honor in snowboarding.
“To be honest,” Gerard told me, “I’ve never felt better on a board.”
It’s a new era in Gerard’s career, and like any major change, it wasn’t easy at first—but now he’s reaping the benefits of sticking it out.
“It was definitely hard the last two years going through sponsor changes,” Gerard said. “You just don’t want to get that rep of going around transferring companies, but for me it really was like a rebrand, and I’m really happy with where I’m at now.”
Red Gerard celebrates winning a second consecutive gold medal in X Games men's slopestyle
Like many of the riders, Gerard wasn’t sure about the new playoff format. But “at the end of the day, it does feel like the best rider riding that day is gonna end up winning,” he said.
He also appreciated how quickly the final went in the new format. Rather than sitting and waiting 20 minutes for every other rider in the field to drop, Gerard found himself in such a flow state in the five-rider final that he almost—almost—lost sight of the fact that he was in a competition.
After taking a well-deserved day to celebrate his win, Gerard is now getting refocused ahead of the U.S. Grand Prix, also in Aspen, later this week. It represents a valuable opportunity to accumulate points toward qualifying for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics.
“I’m trying to set myself the best possible way I can. That’s my whole goal,” he said, adding that the Covid-limited Beijing 2022 Games, where his friends and family weren’t able to be in attendance, wasn’t the note he wanted to end his Olympic career on.
“Back in 2018 I was such a newbie, I just didn’t know anything,” he said. “And now I want to go to Italy and feel like I know what to expect.”
If he keeps riding like this, Gerard should expect to add another piece of Olympic hardware to his collection come 2026.
