Believe it or not, American free skier Nick Goepper, a three-time Olympic medalist, thinks growing up in Indiana—a location that doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of powdery snow and ski chalets—worked to his advantage. Sure, the slope in Lawrenceburg, an Ohio River Valley city of some 5,000 residents, 20 miles west of downtown Cincinnati, had only a 400-ft. vertical drop. But the hill was so small that lights could keep the entire slope illuminated, giving Goepper access to hours of skiing on weeknights after school, not to mention upwards of 20 hours on the weekends. The facility, Perfect North Slopes, was also 10-minute drive from his house.
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“It was the best place I ever could have grown up to learn how to ski,” says Goepper. “The repetitions that I was able to accumulate at this small hill in Indiana as a teenager were far, far more than a lot of my friends who may have grown up in more mountainous places.”
Little did he know at the time, though, that he would one day be on the verge of making Olympic history. With a medal at the Milano Cortina Olympics, Goepper, 31, would be the first American individual sports athlete to ever reach the podium in four different Winter Olympic Games. He won a bronze medal in slopestyle skiing at the Sochi Games in 2014, before following that up with silvers in PyeongChang and Beijing. All that’s left is gold. And since the last Olympics, Goepper has made a surprise switch, to the halfpipe discipline, to pursue his missing Olympic title.
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Goepper has never shied away from a challenge. While he is grateful for his Indiana roots, he is also realist. So after showing promise in some local and regional competitions, he knew he’d have to move to the more mountainous west to reach the elite national level. To help fund a potential move, not to mention ski passes at Perfect North Slopes, Goepper hustled. He went door to door in his neighborhood, handing out biographical pamphlets that explained what he was trying to accomplish in freeskiing and asking for donations. He sold candy bars on his school bus. He offered babysitting services. Goepper’s father Chris installed a sign on their front lawn that read: “Dependable babysitting, call Nick.” Classmates saw the sign while riding by Goepper’s home on the school bus, mortifying the teenage Goepper. But it did the trick. “I got this really, really good babysitting job with this awesome family, and it completely justified it,” says Goepper. “I was like, ‘I can’t take this thing down. It’s working.’”
When Goepper was 15, he earned a scholarship to Windells Academy—now named Wy’East Mountain Academy—in Oregon, where he took classes and trained at Mount Hood. He earned a spot on the U.S. team for Sochi, where freeskiing made its Olympic debut. Before those Games, Goepper met Taylor Swift at the Golden Globes and snapped a picture with the pop superstar. “Travis Kelce, your boy was there during the first Era,” Goepper said in a cheeky Instagram video posted in October 2023. “She asked to take a picture with me!”
The Americans swept the slopestyle-skiing podium in Russia, with Joss Christensen winning gold, Gus Kenworthytaking silver, and Goepper taking the bronze. They went on a whirlwind media tour, making joint appearances on the Today Show and on Late Night With David Letterman. They appeared together on a Corn Flakes box. The busy schedule, and Goepper’s pecking order in the group, wore on his psyche. “It was very, very hard for me to be grouped into the trio,” he says. “I just wanted to be the winner. I wanted to be the guy, instead of the guys.”
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That summer of 2014, after all the commotion subsided, Goepper began to spiral. He drank heavily, and thought about taking his own life. He entered a 60-day rehab program in Texas in the fall of 2015 to treat his alcohol abuse and depression. He’s been sober ever since. “By not drinking and not isolating yourself, you give yourself the best chance to overcome anxiety and depression and connect with other people,” says Goepper.
After the back-to-back silvers in South Korea and China, Goepper thought he was done with freeskiing. He tuned in to the 2023 X Games from home. “I’m sitting on my couch watching some of my former teammates and friends perform on TV, and I was waiting for this super crazy regret, a stomach drop, thinking, ‘Man, I wish I was there. Oh my God, I made the wrong decision.’ But I didn’t have that at all. Zero.”
Soon afterward, however, at a Red Bull event in Austria, Goepper began messing around on a quarterpipe. “It kind of brought back this almost like childhood feeling of trying to figure out something new,” he says. “I’m competitive, and so I thought, ‘What if I got back into this, but in halfpipe? My body still feels good. I could go back to the Olympics. Whoa. How cool would that be?’ So I kind of just wrote the story in my head and watched it play out.”
Goepper won an X Games gold in the superpipe — riding down and up a larger U-shaped tube than a halfpipe, doing aerial tricks — in 2025, and finished second in this year’s event, in late January. He has reached the podium in seven World Cup halfpipe events; he won the stop in Calgary in January of this year and finished second in the World Championships in 2025.
He knows he can achieve an unprecedented medals streak. But Goepper is trying hard not to dwell on it. “If you start thinking about all these bigger consequences, I think you can really spiral into an unhealthy state of mind,” says Goepper. “So returning to why you love it, with who you love to do it with, is the most important thing.”
The post With One More Medal, Free Skier Nick Goepper Will Make Olympic History appeared first on TIME.
