Hall of fame

Tanner Hall's career is getting as huge and complex as his gold-winning superpipe run at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., last week.

The 24-year-old Kalispell native put on a savvy, whirling aerial attack: A right-side 900-degree rotation, a left-side 1260-degree spin, an Alley Oop flat-spin 540, a left-side 900, an Alley Oop 360 to a switch 720 and closing with an Alley Oop 900.

That's seven tricks packed into a pipe where his nearest challenger, Simon Dumont, pulled off five tricks.

The win gave Hall a record seven gold medals in X Games events over a meteoric career that started on Big Mountain. And it was an unprecedented three-peat in the superpipe.

Over the weekend, Hall won more events in an Aspen resort competition, along with some towering accolades at a Powder Magazine banquet: the King of Quarters award for quarterpipe competition; Line of the Year; Skier of the Year; and a readers poll that named him the No. 2 skier in the world behind icon Seth Morrison.

"It was a good week for sure," Hall said in a telephone interview from his home in Park City, Utah, this week.

And that's an understatement.

To many of his peers in the skiing world, Hall has become the best all-around skier in the world. One after another they say so in a documentary on Hall that has been airing on satellite television's Rush TV.

"There's just something special about Tanner. He's wired very differently," filmmaker Constantine Papanicolaou said in the "Rush on Hall" documentary. "He's got this uncanny athletic ability and he's got a charisma and a sort of aura about him that really kind of puts him on that level above everyone else."

Papanicolou has been around Hall a lot as part of the team that produced "Believe," an adrenaline-stoked movie starring Hall pulling off big tricks from Whistler to Mount Baker. It won the movie-of-the-year award at the Powder banquet over the weekend, when Hall's collective accomplishments appeared to be reaching a crescendo.

"He's just in the middle of blowing up big time right now," said Hall's father, Gerry, a Flathead Valley lumber broker. "It's going to be huge and it's great because he deserves it."

Hall's father wonders out loud: "How's he going to top all of that now? It's just unbelievable."

Along with stretching his interests into filmmaking, Hall is a principal partner in Armada, a company that manufactures the twin-tip skis that Hall puts to use, forwards and backwards, in every competition.

He's also a partner in a

cat skiing company that operates at Retallack, British Columbia.

Despite the potential business distractions, Hall says he remains focused on skiing and has more to accomplish in competition.

"It's definitely probably the best year of my life at the X-Games," he said. "I'm just going to keep on my mission. I don't feel like I have achieved anywhere near my potential."

With the support of his dad and his mother, Darla, Hall left the Flathead Valley at age 14 for Park City, where he hoped to advance his talents in freestyle skiing. Since then, he has piled up dozens of wins and has become a mentor for younger skiers and an ambassador and innovator for the sport.

Hall marveled that he was the oldest competitor in last week's superpipe competition.

"It's kind of crazy," he said. "I used to be the youngest and now I'm the oldest and it still feels good to be on top."

And it hasn't been exactly easy. Hall is known for being obsessively dedicated to training for competition as well as overcoming severe adversity.

A Google search for Tanner Hall turns up a widely viewed YouTube video clip titled, "Tanner Hall Chad's Gap Fall."

Filmed from a variety of angles on March 5, 2005, the clip shows Hall attempting to jump across a 130-foot chasm at Alta known as Chad's Gap. Hall makes a high-speed backwards approach to the launch, executes flat spins as he flies across the gap and then violently smashes into the front side of a landing and goes into a cartwheeling crash.

He can be heard screaming, "My ankles are broken! My ankles are broken!"

Hall later described the feeling of "bombs going off in my boots" because his ankles were indeed shattered.

Some people predicted that the injuries spelled the end of his skiing career, but after months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Hall made a comeback.

"I've recovered perfectly," Hall says, noting that he will work out hard all summer to make sure he maintains his health.

Regarding all of his ventures, Hall typically refers to "we" rather than "me." He relies on tight circles of friends and family and even rival skiers in most of his pursuits, particularly filmmaking.

"Believe" features a stable of the world's top skiers, including Seth Morrison, and the Armada ski company, based in Costa Mesa, Calif., is largely anchored by Hall's brother, Tyler, the sales and marking director.

In competition, Hall is gracious in his support for other skiers. After last week's superpipe win, he had high praise on national television for his chief rival, Simon Dumont, who had an enormous run with soaring altitude on his tricks.

"Simon undeniably went really, really big. But he was with five hits in one direction," Hall said this week, explaining that his seven tricks with rotational change-ups put him over the top. "The judges like to see how many tricks you've got in your bag. He opted to go really fast, point it downhill and go for a lot of amplitude."

In past X-Games, Hall has competed in multiple events, including slopestyle and freeskiing, but this year, he competed only in the superpipe.

"I wanted to focus on the three-peat," he said. "Every year from here on out, if I hit another goal it's just icing on the cake."

Hall said last week's turn of events brought a swarm of media attention.

"It's nice that it happened. People just went nuts," he said. "I've never done so many interviews."

With the exception of a Park City competition that Hall will enter for fun, Hall's has no more major events this winter.

"Now it's just a matter of making movies and getting in helicopters and skiing some really big lines," he said.

Next up for Hall is a film that's in production called, "The Massive," which he describes as being "a spinoff of 'Believe' but a lot more action-packed."

Just as he has played a huge role in reshaping the world of skiing, Hall says there is potential to take to a new level a film genre dominated for decades by Warren Miller.

"I have a pretty good vision for where I want to see skiing go, and I want to stay behind it," he said. "This is just the beginning."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com