Colby Stevenson, Alex Hall Earn First Medals In Freestyle Worlds
by Karen Price
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Colby Stevenson competes at the FIS Snowboard and Freeski World Championship on March 11, 2021 in Aspen, Colo.
With only two skiers left on Saturday, it appeared Colby Stevenson was going to be the new men's slopestyle skiing world champion.
Switzerland’s Andri Ragettli, the 2020 X Games slopestyle champion, put an end to that.
Ragettli bumped Stevenson off the top spot on the podium with his third and final run, scoring a 90.65 at the FIS World Championships in Aspen, Colorado. Stevenson finished with the silver medal and 2018 Olympian Alex Hall, who struggled on his first two runs, vaulted from second-to-last to third place on the final run of the entire competition.
In just his second world championships and first since 2015, Stevenson wowed the judges with his second run to not only move onto the podium but take the top spot with a score of 89.55. After a strong rail section up top, his tricks on the jumps included a switch left 1440, a switch right double 1260 and a left double cork 1620.
“That felt good,” the Park City, Utah, native said at the bottom, as he found out he’d jumped from sixth place to first ahead of opening run leader and defending champion James Woods of Great Britain.
Woods ended up just off the podium thanks to Hall. The former Youth Olympic Games silver medalist qualified in first place but had trouble early on in both his first two runs. He finally put together a solid rails section and landed his tricks to go from a top score of 44.70 to 86.01 to slip past Woods for the bronze medal.
The world championship medals were the first for both Stevenson and Hall, who was fourth in big air in 2019.
Competing in her first world championships, Marin Hamill qualified in second place after China’s Eileen Gu and was the lone U.S. athlete on the women’s side. Hamill stood in third place after the opening run and fifth by the time she took her second run. She improved on the middle run, scoring a 71.18 with tricks that included a right side 900 tail grab and a switch 540, but it wasn’t enough for the podium and she ended in fifth place.
Gu earned her second gold medal in as many days after winning the halfpipe competition on Friday.
Karen Price
Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.