Skiing
On the Fly: Mac Forehand
The skill of the freestyle skier may appear spontaneously effortless, but this master puts in the work to create art in the air.
PICTURE PERFECT
The clutch moments of freestyle skier Mac Forehand’s life are fleeting. Launching from the lip of a jump, he’s in the air, gyrating madly for only about three seconds, and spinning so quickly that the untrained eye sees nothing but a blur of awesomeness. The intricacy of his tricks—the Double Cork 1800, for instance, which combines two flips with five complete helicopter twists—is so hard to absorb that most of us watching just think, “Woah, that dude runs on pure radness and stoke!”
He doesn’t. Forehand, 24, is a medal prospect for both freeskiing events in Milan-Cortina—big air and slopestyle (think rail slides, ramps, obstacles)—because he’s a workaholic, a perfectionist. Living at the Olympic Training Center in Park City, Utah, he spends his summers making thousands of twisting leaps into an airbag. Then he studies videos of his jumps. He trampolines and lifts weights. He goes down to New Zealand to train, and when he makes films—of, say, his rail slides down urban staircases—he micromanages the edits. “I’m just super particular about what I want the shot to look like,” he says.
Mac Forehand, 24, has won three X Games medals.
© Christian Pondella
Representing Team USA in elite competition since he was 17, Forehand has won three X Games medals, two silvers and a gold. With filmmaker Jacques Price, meanwhile, he recently released a beautiful 10-minute film, Duo, which sees him schussing through powder in dazzling backcountry locales, among them Whistler, British Columbia, and Logan, Utah.
So what’s next? Forehand is transfixed by The One Shot, a four-minute video that captures, without pause or cuts, legendary mountain biker Brandon Semenuk cruising down a long green hill, seamlessly flowing and flipping through a medley of berms and jumps. “Maybe one day I’ll do a shoot like that,” he says. “One run, one shot, a whole bunch of cool features. Like you could have a huge jump, maybe 50 feet high, then a canyon after that, and then after that . . .”
Yes, for perfectionist Mac Forehand, the perfect ski run is still out there, on the distant horizon.
"The big tricks—you don't want to do them a lot," Forehand says.
© Christian Pondella
As he shot backcountry footage for his new film, Duo, Forehand’s 500-pound snowmobile got stuck in the snow several times. He spent hours shoveling it out. Still, he skied powder that was “surreal—you hit a cliff,” he says, remembering one divine day in Wyoming, “and you land and you submarine under the snow and then you just kind of pop out. It’s like floating.”
Forehand specializes in two events, big air and slopestyle, pictured here.
© Christian Pondella
“My heart feels like it’s going to fall out of me,” Forehand says, describing the anxiety that seizes him before he competes in slopestyle. “I have like six or seven features to worry about, so it’s definitely like, ‘Calm the breath, relax, focus.’ ”
"I've always been good at knowing where I'm at in the air," Forehand says.
© Christian Pondella
“I was scared all day,” Forehand says, recalling his 2023 bid to become the first skier ever to nail an inverted rail slide (pictured above)—that is, scraping his skis, midflip, on a metal bar hanging directly overhead. “But I skied until 5 o’clock. I skied until I hit the rail probably like 15 times. I wanted to get the good shot. I wanted to do something that no one had ever done before.”
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