Nick Goepper was ‘lost.’ In the Utah desert, the three-time Olympic medalist has found a way back.

The feeling started to creep in before Nick Goepper’s skis reached the base of the hill in Beijing.

He was done. Drained. Exhausted. His smile on the podium hid it all, a third freestyle skiing medal in his third Olympic Games, but he flew home from China four years ago questioning himself like he never had. It wasn’t disappointment washing over him, wasn’t regret, wasn’t even relief. No, this one was new. This one scared him.

“How do you fall out of love with something that’s been so important to you since you were a child?” he says.

Goepper was a professional skier who didn’t want to ski anymore. He was worried something was wrong with him.

Eleven months later, he was sitting on his couch in Salt Lake City, watching the Winter X Games on TV for the first time since he was 14. He hadn’t touched a ski since Beijing. He hadn’t wanted to. “I was expecting this extreme case of FOMO,” he says, “like, ‘Oh my God, I wanna be there, I need to be there.’”

The FOMO never came. Goepper took it as a sign: A chapter in his life was closing. His competitive days were over.

He was 28 years old, ready to move on.

Friends begged him to wait. Don’t tell your sponsors yet, they urged, in case you change your mind, in case you need the money. “I had a lot of people telling me I should fake it to make it,” Goepper says. “They were like, ‘Just ski a little bit, film some stuff, continue to get your paychecks.’” Problem was, he hated the idea. Do that, and he’d feel like a total fraud.

He told his sponsors he was retiring.

“It might’ve been a bad business decision, but I told them, ‘I’m done skiing for money.’”

It was a sobering realization for Goepper; this was all he’d ever known, all he’d ever wanted. He was the Indiana kid who built a skatepark in his backyard instead of a basketball hoop, so he could practice his tricks year-round. During the winter, he’d cram 100 runs in a day on the local ski slope, then a few more after he saw his mom’s car pull into the parking lot.

His talents took him to Sochi, Russia, in 2014, where he won bronze in slopestyle at age 19; then Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018, where he won silver; then Beijing four years later, where he brought home another silver. He was good-looking and gregarious and never turned down an interview. He relished the rush of attention. He became one of the faces of Team USA.

But beneath the bubbly personality hid a private pain, something Goepper eventually had to grapple with. He partied. He drank too much. He fell into a deep depression and fought off suicidal thoughts. Hit with a severe panic attack in August 2014, he found himself wandering the streets of his hometown, throwing rocks at cars. The financial damage grew into the thousands. He later turned himself into authorities, paid back his victims and apologized.

The lowest point, his parents say, wouldn’t arrive until a year later, when Goepper’s anxiety grew so severe that he ended up in the emergency room.

“He was really lost,” his mom, Linda, says. “It was kind of a detective game to figure out (where we could help him).”

Everyone saw the success. What no one could sniff out — even his own parents — was the mental anguish hiding behind it.

“The Olympic experience is amazing, but there is a flip side,” Linda Goepper continues. “At first, we weren’t seeing the downside and all the pressure he was under. Until it kind of just … imploded.”

After the emergency room trip, progress came slowly. Goepper stopped drinking. He cut back on the partying. A diagnosis — depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder — helped pave a path forward. So did routine therapy, among the resources Goepper has leaned on through the U.S. Ski and Snowboard team. Today, he’s one of the sport’s leading advocates for mental health awareness, using his story as a vehicle to remind others about the depths from which he climbed.

To Goepper’s surprise, a few of his sponsors stayed with him after he stepped away from the sport in 2023. Deep down, he kept waiting for that pull, that excitement to seep into him at the start of ski season, the way it had every winter since he was 5 years old. It wasn’t there. For a while, he waded into the unknown.

Now, he calls it the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

“I had to identify as Nick Goepper, the human,” he says, “not Nick Goepper, the guy plastered in logos.”

Finally, inspiration came via an unlikely source: a pair of rollerblades. Ten months into his retirement, Goepper was skating in a Red Bull event in Austria, toying around on the halfpipe ramp, when it hit him. What if he tried qualifying for the Olympics in a completely different event?

“I thought he was joking,” Linda Goepper says.

But the more he talked about it, the more those around him could tell: He needed a challenge like this, something so audacious that plenty inside the sport would scoff at.

“Very bold,” says his dad, Chris. “But that’s Nick.”

“It felt like an itch he had to scratch,” says his longtime girlfriend, Corinn Childs. “And everyone was skeptical at first. It kinda shook the ski community. A lot of people were like, ‘Is he serious?’”

He was. Goepper was scrapping slopestyle, the only discipline he’d competed in as a pro, for the halfpipe. Instead of racing down a mountain at 40 mph, mixing tricks and jumps off ramps and obstacles along the way, he’d launch off the halfpipe’s U-shaped walls and perform aerial tricks on his skis somewhere between 20 and 30 feet in the air.

There was some carryover, sure. But there was also plenty to learn. (No men’s skier has ever medaled in both disciplines in Olympic history; China’s Eileen Gu is the only woman to do it.)

“No way, I’d never do that,” says Alex Hall, the 2022 slopestyle gold medalist and one of the best freeskiers in the world. “I love the halfpipe when it’s soft and slushy in the spring, but when it’s icy, it’s way too scary for me.”

Next, Goepper conjured up another truly crazy idea, one only he could conceive: He bought 40 acres of land in the Utah desert and decided to construct his own skatepark, complete with a 13-foot quarterpipe and a 50-foot airbag he imported from Canada. (“We had to classify it as a gift so we didn’t get in trouble at customs,” he admits.) Goepper and his roommate built it themselves, refusing to hire professional help. All it took was six weeks, some lumber and roughly 10,000 screws. He called it Rollerblade Ranch.

The more he trained, the more he could feel the fire coming back.

He skied his first season in jeans, an ode to his Midwest roots. Then he started to sniff some success. Then more. Within a few months, he’d won a silver medal at the world championships and a fifth X Games gold. Last winter, he became the oldest U.S. male skier ever — and first in his 30s — to win a World Cup freeski event.

Some were stunned. Others, not so much.

“He’s more fundamentally sound than maybe anyone ever,” says Hunter Hess, another decorated U.S. halfpipe skier. “Watch his takeoffs — they’re all stock. It’s robotic for him.”

Goepper enters next month’s Olympic Games in Italy as a serious contender in the halfpipe, and he’ll arrive with plans to try a move he says has never been seen before. Pull it off, and it would likely be enough to earn Goepper the one thing that’s eluded him throughout his career: Olympic gold.

He calls it a “switch-double misty 1260,” and it features a backward takeoff, two and a half flips in the air, two rotations, then a backward landing. It is preposterously difficult. Goepper spent the better part of a year honing it at Rollerblade Ranch, eyeing the Olympics as the ultimate stage for his reveal.

Shying away from the spotlight has never been his thing.

If he medals, he’ll become the first American freestyle skier to do so in four different Winter Olympics. But, as Childs points out, this comeback wasn’t about just bringing home a medal from Italy.

“He’s got a bronze and two silvers already,” she says. “So let’s be real honest: He wants gold this time. He wants the full set.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.