Alex Hall skis at the Winter X Games on Jan. 27, 2019 in Aspen, Colo.
Olympic skier Alex Hall made his first Winter X Games medal a big one, and veteran snowboarder and Olympian Danny Davis claimed his first hardware since 2015 on the final day of competition in Aspen, Colorado, on Sunday.
Hall was competing in his fifth X Games and his third in Aspen, but until Sunday he hadn’t been able to reach the podium in any of his contests. That included a fifth-place finish on Saturday in the big air event.
His first run of the men’s slopestyle competition on Sunday was good enough to put him in second place. On his second run, Hall cleaned things up and took a big jump up in his score to pass Canada’s Alex Beaulieu-Marchand on the leaderboard and take first place.
Still leading with a score of 94.33 going into his third and final run, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for improvement, but Hall managed to do even better. Smooth and creative through the top rail section, he mixed it up and landed cleanly through the hits and ended with a switch right side double cork 1260 for a score of 95.66 with only four competitors remaining.
Beaulieu-Marchand held on for second with his score of 92.66 on his first run, and Ferdinand Dahl of Norway took bronze with an 80.33.
Willie Borm of Chaska, Minnesota, was seventh and two-time Olympian Nick Goepper was eighth.
The snowboarders closed things out in the superpipe. Australia’s Scotty James won his fourth X Games medal and second gold with a top score of 94.00 and Japan’s Yuto Totsuka claimed the silver in his X Games debut.
Davis made his X Games debut in 2006. An innovator in the pipe discipline, he won consecutive gold medals at the X Games in 2014 and 2015 and was a 2014 Olympian who finished 10th.
2018 Olympians Chase Josey, Jake Pates and Ben Ferguson were chasing all night but finished fourth, fifth and sixth, respectively. Toby Miller was eighth.
Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
