'You're always working on something new': How Olympians come up with new tricks
- - 'You're always working on something new': How Olympians come up with new tricks
Dan WolkenFebruary 11, 2026 at 9:48 PM
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(Hector Vivas/Getty Images) (Hector Vivas via Getty Images)
If you feel like you need a glossary to follow snowboarding and freestyle skiing at the Winter Olympics, you’re not alone.
These sports, which have migrated from the X Games culture into the mainstream, have a language of their own. Words like “rodeo” (a backward flip while also rotating horizontally), “cork” (an off-axis rotation that can be done frontside or backside) and the all-important “grab” (literally just grabbing the ski or snowboard with the hand during a trick) will be repeated dozens of times by commentators during the competition.
Rather than focusing on the terminology, the best way to consume these sports is simply by watching and appreciating the daring nature of the tricks, which happen in a matter of seconds but contain multiple elements of spins and flips and grabs that are designed to impress a panel of judges.
The more audacious and creative the trick, the higher the score — if the skier or snowboarder can execute it and land cleanly back on the ground.
But this is not like a concert where a musician gets up on stage and plays their greatest hits over and over again. The bar for what’s required to win is constantly being raised, meaning a significant part of a competitor’s time between Olympics is spent simply developing new ideas.
“The tricks we're doing now are already a lot harder than they were three or four years ago,” said freestyle skier Alex Hall, who won the slopestyle gold medal four years ago in Beijing with a so-called “pretzel” trick that he landed for the first time on his final practice before the event. “So everyone's learned a bunch of new stuff. And (last) spring, I learned some stuff. I don't want to release anything yet, but you're always working on something new.”
What does that entail? It can be a surprisingly long and arduous process just to get to the point where a competitor feels comfortable trying it on their skis or snowboard.
“We do so much summer training on trampolines or water ramps and jump training so when we bring those tricks to snow, we are at a 90% land percentage,” said Jaelin Kauf, who won the silver medal in moguls four years ago. “(We have to be) so confident that we're going to be able to land and execute them, and we spend so much time working on that air awareness to be comfortable flipping around and getting a little lost in the air.”
Here’s how Alex Ferreira, a freestyle skier who specializes in the halfpipe and has medaled in the last two Winter Olympics, described his process of developing new tricks and getting ready for competition in a sport that’s all about pushing boundaries:
Step 1: Forming an idea
“You think about it, you see it in your head. You think it possibly could work.
“Some steps can take two days. Some steps can take two years. And I've been stuck in all different types of the steps. A lot of trial and error. Definitely a lot of trial and error.
“I would say there's a set line between style and degree of difficulty. Most people are not concerned mostly with flipping and twisting to get a higher score, but they're more looking for something that looks nice in the air.
“I’m maybe a bit more of a conservative, and I'm proven wrong every single day. When I think the ceiling is here, people push it up higher and higher.”
Alex Ferreira during a training run at the US Grand Prix at Aspen Snowmass Ski Resort. (Dustin Satloff/U.S. Ski and Snowboard/Getty Images) (Dustin Satloff via Getty Images)Step 2: Practicing indoors at a training center
“I try it on the trampoline. Then from there I'll rollerblade into a foam pit or into an airbag. And then from there I'll do it on plastic and jump off a jump into an airbag — a giant airbag — with skis on. These airbags are 300 feet long, 100 feet wide and 15 feet thick of air. So they're giant machines.
“I’ll do that probably at least 100 jumps. It just depends on how quickly the mind can grasp the concept. I picked up the right side double cork 1260 in like 20 minutes. It was super easy for me. I don't know why. And then the switch unnatural double cork 1080 took me four years.”
Step 3: Building confidence
“When you're doing all these different simulations, these training mechanisms, you're simulating what you're going to do on snow, and you're building that kinesthetic air awareness. So are there times where you feel a little less confident in your air awareness? Yeah, there definitely are just like, there's times when you're less confident in going up and asking a girl out or something like that. It's very natural human thing to happen to you. For the most part, I've been able to have strong conviction in the flips and twists and take offs and landings.
“I'm very aware, extremely focused, trying to practice as much as I possibly can beforehand so that when it does come time to do the trick on snow, the mentality is, of course, I'm nervous, but I always like to think about the nerves are making you more focused and more in the zone.
“Everybody [is] taking it more seriously. I remember back when I was coming up, if you went to a training camp in the fall, that was pretty rare. Now people are going to one, two, three training camps in the span of three months, and they're 100% going in the fall. So there’s a level of professionalism that wasn't there before.”
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Step 4: Checking conditions, forming a gameplan
“You have to change your mind quite a bit. If the stars align, it's sunny, it's not windy and there's an open area in the halfpipe that you have a moment to do a trick that you've been really working and you know now is the time, you will still have to push yourself internally. And then there will be other times when the gameplan changes. For instance, it starts to become windy. The clouds are rolling in. The light has changed. It's snowing, it's slower. Don't do this right now. Preserve yourself and come back another day.
“On the first day of training, and you can see it and feel (the quality of the halfpipe). You can watch the other competitors. And if you can see that the level is high and they're doing a lot of their harder tricks, that would give me a little bit more inclination to start doing my harder tricks. Usually, I kind of set the tone. Now that I'm the older version of myself, and I'm kind of one of the older people in the sport, I've always been like, ‘Okay, if I can land the predecessor of the really hard trick, if I can land it about halfway down the wall, then I know I should be safe. That’s kind of my rule of thumb.
“Some of the competitors will kind of hold everything close and tight to their chest. I will 100% ask, ‘Hey, what do you think about the third hit or the fourth hit?’ And then they'll give (their opinion). They'll release the information reluctantly, usually at first, and then they'll have a question for me. I'll answer it right off the gun, because they could have just saved my life. So I don't hold anything. It's a very much open sport. The chips are going to fall where they may. You've either put in the work or you haven't. We're going to have a contest. I'm going to land my run. I hope you land your run, but we'll see who wins.”
Step 5: Time to go
“Very rarely would I pull an audible and go off script. It would only be in the case of in the middle of the run, if I think I made a mistake, you have about a second and a half from the time you landed to the time you're going to take off again. So you really need to have a good idea, or you need to have strong conviction to be able to change your run on a dime. I've only changed my run probably five times in my whole career.
“If I saw somebody do a brand new trick that I've never seen before, I wouldn't necessarily go off my script. I would still stay on my script and do the best job that I possibly can, and then maybe come back the next week and try and implement a new trick.
“There's no way you can get to the top without taking a few good, strong crashes. Once you do take a crash, you learn quickly.”
Source: “AOL Sports”
