Henrik Harlaut

Åre, Sweden / Andorra | Active: 2011-present | Known for: X Games big air record, Olympic big air bronze, style-led film projects | Current: active skier and filmmaker working with Armada, Monster Energy and CHIMI, with recent projects including Lo & Behold and ORNADA

Sochi did not introduce Henrik Harlaut as a medalist. It introduced him as a force. On the first Olympic freeski slopestyle course in 2014, Harlaut dropped in wearing pants so loose they became part of the run. They sagged low enough to steal headlines, yet the skiing underneath the circus was sharp enough to land him sixth. That is the cleanest opening scene for his career because it holds both halves of the story at once. He never treated competition as a place where personality had to be trimmed away. He brought the whole package into the course: dreadlocks flying, stance loose, grabs held with confidence, and the kind of body language that made a judged run look like a session clip. Sochi gave freeskiing its first Olympic costume drama. Harlaut made sure the skiing was good enough to keep the outfit from becoming the whole story.

Åre built the rhythm before the medals arrived. Harlaut is tied to Åre in the same way some skiers are tied to a single turn shape or a single trick. The mountain town sits deep in modern Scandinavian freeski history, and Harlaut came out of it with the relaxed shoulders, switch comfort and park fluency that mark that scene at its best. X Games lists Åre as his place of birth, and the Swedish competition record kept feeding off the same environment for years. Åre has race culture, yes, but it also has parks, spring laps, side-hit imagination and a long memory for riders who make skiing look playful instead of over-rehearsed.

Later, Andorra became another key base. Monster’s athlete page names Sunset Park Peretol by Henrik Harlaut as his favorite place to compete or practice, which tells you a lot about the later version of his skiing. Harlaut did not age into a veteran who only shows up when the bib goes on. He kept building spaces around the kind of skiing he likes: technical takeoffs, loose expression, room for weird ideas, room for style. The roots are Swedish. The operating map is broader than that.

The X Games stretch turned him from cult favorite into hard data. Plenty of skiers get remembered for style first and results second. Harlaut made that impossible by stacking too much hardware. X Games’ official athlete page credits him with 14 medals and eight golds, more ski podiums and more ski golds than anyone else in the event’s history. The rise was not one hot weekend. He took big air silver at Aspen 2013, then hit Aspen 2014 and won both slopestyle and big air. He returned to the top of slopestyle in Aspen 2016. In Norway 2017 he won slopestyle again. In Aspen 2018 he won big air and took slopestyle silver. Norway 2019 brought another big air gold. Aspen 2020 delivered his sixth big air gold. Aspen 2021 added both big air and knuckle huck gold.

That medal run matters because the events ask different questions. Big air rewards raw takeoff precision, amplitude and the ability to make one trick look complete. Slopestyle asks for pacing, rails, direction changes and a full-course brain. Knuckle huck strips the format down and puts pressure back on creativity. Harlaut did not survive across those lanes by accident. He kept showing up because his skiing could handle all three languages.

A timeline with the dates left visible. Harlaut’s public record is easier to understand when the highlights are pinned down cleanly. Aspen 2013 brought the first X Games big air silver. Aspen 2014 brought the slopestyle and big air double. Sochi 2014 brought sixth in the first Olympic slopestyle final. Aspen 2016 brought another X Games slopestyle gold. The 2016/17 season ended with the first FIS big air Crystal Globe in men’s freeskiing, with Harlaut taking two wins, a second place and the season title. Norway 2017 added X Games slopestyle gold. Aspen 2018 added big air gold and slopestyle silver. Utah 2019 brought world-championship silver in big air. Aspen 2020 brought his sixth X Games big air gold. Aspen 2021 brought big air gold and knuckle huck gold. Beijing 2022 brought Olympic big air bronze and a slopestyle start. Aspen 2024 brought knuckle huck silver. Then the film-heavy chapter kept moving with Lo & Behold in 2025 and ORNADA in 2026.

The trick language is all Henrik: nose butter first, landing second. Harlaut’s favorite trick, according to Monster, is the nosebutter triple cork 1620. That is not just a fun profile detail. It tells you exactly how he thinks about skiing. Many contest riders build from the safest possible in-run into the cleanest possible takeoff. Harlaut likes to change the sentence before it even starts. The butter at the lip rewrites the trick from the first frame. The move is still huge, still dangerous, still built on heavy rotation and exact timing, but it does not begin from a rigid pose. It begins from play.

That same logic runs through the rest of his skiing. He likes switch entries, late pop, off-axis control, grabs that read clearly instead of flashing by, and takeoffs that feel styled rather than simply loaded. On rails and knuckles, the same taste shows up as tail butters, nose presses, weird redirections and body language that stays calm when the trick is anything but simple. The mechanics are elite. The visual message is looser than elite skiing often looks. That combination is why younger skiers copy not just his tricks but his posture, his timing and even the way he stands in the in-run.

He never treated the Olympics like a separate sport. Some skiers go to the Games and try to sand off their edges. Harlaut never really did. The first Olympic chapter came in Sochi, where he finished sixth in slopestyle and still ended up etched into the cultural memory of the event. PyeongChang 2018 kept him in the Olympic orbit for slopestyle. Beijing 2022 finally brought the medal, a bronze in big air behind Birk Ruud and Colby Stevenson. He also lined up in slopestyle there, which rounded out the picture: still broad enough to contest both lanes, still skilled enough to stay relevant on the sport’s biggest stage eight years after the baggy-pants chaos of Sochi.

The big-air bronze also closed a loop. By 2022 Harlaut was already one of the most decorated X Games skiers ever, already a globe winner, already a long-form film name. The Olympic medal did not create the résumé. It confirmed it in a venue casual fans understand instantly. The run mattered for another reason too. Big air at Olympic level can flatten riders into spin counts and survival landings. Harlaut still looked like Harlaut: technical, stylish, and visibly interested in how the trick looked, not only how many degrees it carried.

Utah 2019 belongs in the middle of the story, not in the margins. Harlaut’s world-championship silver in big air at Utah 2019 often gets overshadowed because his X Games record is so large and his image is so dominant. It should not. The FIS record from the 2019 Swedish team announcement calls out that silver directly, and it says something slightly different from the X Games medals. X Games has always suited Harlaut because the event leaves room for personality. A FIS world championship medal shows he could deliver under a more standardized judging lens as well. It is a cleaner statistical answer to the lazy idea that he was only a style hero or only a media figure.

The movie side is not a hobby. It is half the career. Newschoolers’ long-form interviews and video archive sketch the film line clearly. Road to Zion arrived in 2014. The Regiment came in 2018 as another two-year project. Salute followed in 2020, with Downdays and Newschoolers both treating it as a major release rather than a throwaway web edit. By the time Lo & Behold dropped in February 2025, the pattern was fixed: Harlaut was not dipping into filming between contests. He was producing movie work with the same seriousness he brought to competition, often with Brady Perron and a wider circle of skiers pulled from the Harlaut Apparel orbit and the style-heavy side of the modern scene.

Lo & Behold is a good example because the concept fits him so well. Downdays describes it as a group project moving from European streets to X Games and then into the backcountry of northern Sweden. That range is the Harlaut map in miniature. Urban hits, contest moments, backcountry airs, music, graphics, crew chemistry, wardrobe, and a strong sense that the whole piece was curated rather than merely assembled. Then came ORNADA in 2026, Armada’s two-year team movie, with Harlaut named in the featured cast. By then he was not appearing as a veteran cameo. He was one of the skiers the film had to include if it wanted to say anything serious about style-led freeskiing.

The culture work may end up lasting as long as the medals. Harlaut’s impact is not confined to podiums because he has spent years shaping the atmosphere around skiing too. Newschoolers still frames the B&E Show with Phil Casabon as core web-video material from the early 2010s, while later projects such as BE Inspired, Harlaut Apparel’s team output and his own longer films kept extending that same lane. The line is pretty clean: he helped make comp skiing look less stiff, then helped make style media feel larger than just end-of-season bonus content.

Harlaut Apparel is a real part of that story. Newschoolers interviews around 2021 and 2022 tie him directly to the brand’s growth, and recent projects such as Lo & Behold place the Harlaut Apparel team right inside the film. That matters because it shows Harlaut operating as more than an athlete who licenses a name. He curates a taste: baggy silhouettes, music choices, filming partners, rider mix, and a loose-but-technical way of presenting skiing. CHIMI’s current Henrik Harlaut goggle collaboration fits the same pattern. The product is not random merch. It extends the persona that has always sat beside the skiing.

The 2024 to 2026 chapter says he is still in motion. Harlaut’s current record is not frozen in nostalgia. X Games Aspen 2024 brought knuckle huck silver, proof that he could still climb onto a modern event podium in a format built almost entirely around invention. FIS still lists him as active. Monster still carries him on its athlete roster. CHIMI has a live Henrik Harlaut signature goggle product. Downdays tracked Lo & Behold in 2025 and ORNADA’s trailer and release through late 2025 and early 2026. Put together, that is not the profile of a retired icon living on old edits. It is the profile of a skier whose competitive schedule may ebb and flow, but whose public output still lands in the center of the culture.

Henrik Harlaut’s place is larger than any single result line. The medal table already works: X Games record-holder in ski podiums and golds, 2016/17 big air globe winner, 2019 world silver medallist, 2022 Olympic bronze medallist. The style record is harder to count but just as visible. He turned loose outerwear, nose-butter takeoffs, switch-heavy trick language and a full artist-athlete persona into something mainstream enough that the Olympics could not ignore it and young skiers could not stop borrowing it. Few skiers have enough contest proof to quiet the skeptics and enough cultural force to change how the sport looks on screen. Harlaut has both.

The clean ending for this page is in the present tense. ORNADA is online in 2026. Lo & Behold is fresh. CHIMI has his goggle out. Monster still has him on roster. FIS still marks him active. The career is already historic, but it is not parked in a museum case yet. Henrik Harlaut is still out there, still shaping the visual language of skiing, and still capable of stepping into a course or a movie segment and making the whole frame feel a little less standard.