Courtesy Laax Open
COPPER MOUNTAIN — Snowboarder Magazine announced Tuesday that Summit County resident and Ohio native Red Gerard is one of three finalists for the magazine’s Rider of the Year award, to be presented at Thursday’s inaugural Snowboarder Awards at 7 p.m. at Copper Mountain Resort’s Grand Hall.
In a social media post, Gerard said he was grateful for the nomination and humbled to be in a group with finalists Sage Kotsenburg and Travis Rice.
“Wow, thank you guys so much,” Gerard wrote Tuesday on Instagram. “This is crazy.”
Kotsenburg has devoted time to backcountry snowboarding since his 2014 Sochi slopestyle gold medal win, including co-starring with Gerard in the film “Joy,” which chronicles their backcountry riding last year with pro snowboarder Ben Ferguson and other friends. “Joy” is one of the final nominees for Snowboarder’s Movie of the Year award.
Rice has been a mainstay in the past decade on different rider of the year lists, and this year was nominated for several accomplishments, including his December film “Dark Matter.”
As for Gerard, his win at last year’s Burton U.S. Open slopestyle competition combined with “Joy” and the opening of his free Red’s Backyard rail gardens at resorts across the country — including Copper Mountain — led to the nomination for the 2018 Pyeongchang slopestyle gold medalist.
“It’s no small feat to balance the rigors of the contest season with filming for a movie,” Snowboarder representatives wrote about the 19-year-old. “It’s further remarkable to compile a collection of the year’s most lauded clips while competing. And it’s even more awe-inspiring when those clips represent your first season-long foray into the backcountry, and when you weren’t riding powder lines and sending it off cheese wedges, you were winning the Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships with a backside triple (cork 1440) on the last jump.
“In 2019, this is what Red Gerard did,” the magazine continued. “In ‘Joy,’ a movie that followed the Ohio-born Gerard as he traversed off piste with Sage Kotsenburg and Ben Ferguson, Red’s innate style was unmistakable. Oh, and he opened up namesake parks called Red’s Backyard, inspired by the infamous area behind his family’s Colorado home, at Woodward mountains across the country.”
For more information on the awards show, visit Snowboarder.com/awards.