USA freeskier Alex Hall spins gold against the tide

“Creativity is huge,” the Team USA freeskier Alex Hall told Olympics.com in the weeks building up to his second Winter Games here in Beijing.

“It can’t all just be about more spinning,” he added.

It’s something many slopestyle freeskiers will say, perhaps out of a sense of obligation to appearances. No one wants to admit that more spinning is the easiest way to more points. But you get the sense that Hall really means it. He’d rather take the hard road than win in a bland way.

This is a man who practices what he preaches.

It’s precisely his commitment to the style part of the slopestyle discipline that won him his gold medal here with a first run of three that no one in a finals field full of current and former world champions came close to matching.

“My favourite tricks are the ones that play along a creative line – a unique style,” added Hall, who finished the event more than three-and-half points higher than his teammate and closest chaser Nick Goepper. “With progression being so crazy, a lot of people are just choosing to spin more and more and more.

“I like to think of something creative, that no one else is doing, even if it’s less spinning," continued Hall who was born in Alaska and raised in Switzerland before setting up shop in Park City, Utah. "Stuff you wouldn’t think of is the stuff I like most.”

It was precisely the "stuff no one else thought of" that Hall pulled off in his glory run on 16 February at the Genting Snow Park. After fairly tap dancing through the rail section, he blasted through the middle of the second jump, taking flight and then rebounding off the knuckle beyond it – and launching himself back into the air a second time.

It’s a trick honed in the informal ‘knuckle-huck’ competitions born in