‘Never run out of hobbies’: Olympic medalist Alex Hall on knowing what to do next after success
It’s little surprise that a gold-medal-winning Olympic skier comes from a family that loves the snow, but slopestyle champion Alex Hall’s mom and dad might love it more than most. The pair met on the slopes, Hall told Fast Company, and essentially raised him and his brother on skis. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d be good at it. But luckily, Hall—who took home silver last month at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and gold in Beijing in 2022—is better than good.
And that’s a fortunate thing, because the amateur-to-professional athlete pipeline is already narrow, and most pro careers dry up as athletes move into their 30s. Hall isn’t too sure what his future in the sport will look like—although at 27, he definitely has the potential to show up at the 2030 Games in the French Alps.
Like many high achievers, that question of “what’s next?” can feel pervasive, not to mention daunting. It’s an easy trap to fall into: to start thinking about the next project or success after you’ve just finished the last one.
But Hall believes there’s something that will influence his post-Olympics career: his hobbies and interests outside of skiing.
“I’ve done a couple of internships with businesses and find it fairly interesting,” Hall said. “But I think right now at this point—where I’m at in my life now—it’s hard to really be 100% committed to something like that. It’s hard to envision myself doing that.”
“As a person, you change a lot,” he continued. “And I think when the time comes where I’m competing less or skiing less, I think I’ll have changed enough to where I’ll have something else that I really want to do for a profession or in life. And I have plenty of hobbies. So I’m sure I’ll never run out of hobbies, but it just depends professionally, you know, what will come next.”
In addition to a variety of other sports interests, Hall also spends his time surfing and exploring video production.
Though there’s plenty of cautionary advice out there against turning hobbies into a career, there’s also proof that doing so can be enormously rewarding.
A 2025 study by the International Journal of Research in Marketing interviewed snowsport instructors in New Zealand, Japan, and Canada who left standard jobs to pursue their hobbies-turned-careers over a 10-year span of time.
Though they encountered plenty of challenges, including financial insecurity and needing a lot of training, most respondents reported “experiencing significant personal growth and fulfillment.”
Hall could also transition from skiing to creating action videos for brands and sponsors, like many Olympians have—something he said he’d love to “focus a little more on when I have a little more time and I don’t have to dedicate so much of my time to the competing stuff.”
He’s not the only recent Olympian who takes a refreshingly different approach to success. Alysa Liu, who won gold in women’s individual figure skating in Milan, had actually quit the sport to focus on being a normal teen before picking it back up and crushing it last month on the ice.
Hall was 10 when he found out he might be good at freestyle skiing, despite not really knowing that’s what the sport was called. “We had a trampoline in our backyard, so I started doing some flips and stuff on the trampoline,” Hall said. “But when I was 10, I tried my first flip on skis just kind of randomly. We built a little jump off to the side of a ski run, and there was some fresh snow . . . so soft. And I was with a couple of my friends, and I just kind of randomly tried it and ended up landing it within a couple of tries. And then my love for the sport kind of just . . . was there.”
It may be that kind of openness to serendipity that defines the next chapter of his story, or of anyone’s after they’ve achieved a high amount of success.
Hall is still going strong nearly two decades later. As for what happens during the 2030 Winter Olympic Games (and beyond)—the future is in the snow.