You might be inclined to think of freestyle skiing as one of the new kids on the block at the Winter Olympics — after all, there are lot of young athletes doing it — but some of these flips and spins have been around since they were introduced as demonstration sports at the Calgary Games some 38 years ago.
What started as a sport featuring only moguls and aerials added halfpipe, slopestyle, big air and other contests to the Olympic program in the 2010s thanks, in large part, to the popularity of the same events in snowboarding. These days, you're just as likely to find the world's best action-sports stars putting on skis as snapping into a snowboard.
The three most popular disciplines in this sport fall under the category of “freeskiing” — halfpipe, slopestyle and big air. Those are judged contests in which skiers are graded on how high they fly and the difficulty of their tricks. In moguls, skiers are scored on their form through the bumps and two jumps along with their overall speed. In aerials, which shares some similarities with big air, skiers flip and twist as soar more than 40 feet (12 meters) into the air. There's also skicross, a set of side-by-side elimination showdowns that closes with a four-person race for the medals.
Eileen Gu is the star of this sport. She grew up in San Francisco but competes for her mother's native country of China. Four years ago, she became the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at one Olympics — gold in halfpipe and big air and silver in slopestyle. Canada's Mikael Kingsbury is generally viewed as the best moguls skier of all time. He had 99 World Cup wins heading into this season, along with a gold and two silver medals at the Olympics. American Alex Hall, who considers himself as much of an artist as an athlete on the slopes, looks to defend his title in slopestyle.
The venues are in Livigno, a three-hour drive northeast of Milan. Some of the key dates include big air Feb. 14-17, halfpipe Feb. 19-21 and skicross Feb. 20-21.
Halfpipe freeskiing debuted in 2014, shortly after its foremost pioneer, Sarah Burke, died in a training accident. She had lobbied to get freeskiing into the Olympics. On a magical night in Russia, Burke's parents were in the stands to watch the contest, which ended with the maintenance crew paying tribute to her by skiing down the halfpipe in the shape of a heart. In 2022, Gu capped off her third medal of the Beijing Games — a gold — with a joy-filled “victory lap” down the halfpipe after she had already secured the victory.
Slopestyle courses double as works of art; at the Olympics, it gives course builders a chance incorporate elements of their country into the Olympic playing field. In Russia, skiers had the option of jumping over a giant Russian nesting doll. In Beijing, the course was lined with a replica of the Great Wall, complete with a guard house (the “shred shed”) built as an option on the rails course. It's a secretive process, and as of now, what visual treats will line the course at Livigno Snow Park remain a mystery.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
FILE - Olympic hopeful U.S. freestyle skier, Alex Hall, poses for a photo at Team USA Media Summit, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
FILE - In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Gold medalist Eileen Gu Ailing of China poses during the awards ceremony for the women's halfpipe finals at FIS Freeski World Cup 2025 in Zhangjiakou, north China's Hebei Province, Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024. (Luo Yuan/Xinhua via AP, File)
FILE - Canada's Mikael Kingsbury competes in the men's moguls at the Freestyle World Championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (Gian Ehrenzeller/Keystone via AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Quintin Sharpe considers it a duty to support those without means. Whether collecting food pantry goods through local service groups or helping out his parents' nonprofit music school, he regularly gives back to his small-town waterside community in southeast Wisconsin.
But the 27-year-old wealth manager encountered a situation last year that prompted another form of charity. A former classmate's father got “blindsided” in a motor vehicle accident, he said, and crowdfunding proved to be the “easiest way to help” with hospital bills. He donated more than $100 to the family's GoFundMe campaign.
“Crowdfunding can be a little bit more expedient because there’s less reporting," Sharpe said. "Funds are going directly to one site. It doesn’t have to go through a board, doesn’t have to get approval from a lot of people."
Sharpe is among the roughly 2 in 10 U.S. adults who donated money to a crowdfunding campaign last year, according to the results of a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, with medical expenses proving most common.
Crowdfunding, or pooling donations online through organized platforms such as GoFundMe, has emerged as a convenient way to seek help covering costs for emergency treatment, Little League sports equipment and anything between.
But the poll also shows Americans — including crowdfunding donors — have some doubts about whether people who crowdfund really need the money and use it responsibly. Most U.S. adults don't have high confidence that crowdfunding sites charge reasonable service fees or that campaigns generally reach their goals.
Sharpe said it would be “naive” to think every campaign is “aboveboard.”
“Ultimately, it depends on the person receiving the funds, if they’re gonna do what they say they’re gonna do with it,” he said.
Participation still lags behind more formal avenues for giving.
Overall, the share of Americans who said they had given to a crowdfunding campaign was far fewer than the roughly 7 in 10 who indicated they made a charitable contribution in 2025.
These efforts lend themselves to small gifts. The AP-NORC poll found that about 6 in 10 crowdfunding donors gave $50 or less when they last supported a campaign.
The lower donation sizes underscore the importance of strong personal networks. Without offline connections, or large social media reach, campaigns can face difficulties reaching the critical mass of small-dollar contributors necessary to meet their goal.
Karla Galdamez, a former teacher from California, supported her first crowdfund when a fellow educator died by suicide. She knew him “a little bit,” she said. A group of teachers started a GoFundMe, and she didn’t see another more effective way of collecting donations for his family.
“The word spreads pretty fast like that,” Galdamez said. “Then people start sending each other links. And it works.”
Sites are often filled with requests for tens of thousands of dollars to help subsidize health care costs — or as campaigns often put it, the “long road to recovery." So ingrained is the practice that some patient advocates even recommend crowdfunding to avoid debt.
Sure enough, medical expenses and health care causes proved to be the most commonly supported category in the AP-NORC poll. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults who donated to campaigns this year said their last donation fell in this category, highlighting Americans' high levels of concern about health care costs.
Jeremy Snyder, a bioethicist who researches medical crowdfunding, said its continued prevalence reflects the persistent gap between what insurance covers and what health care costs. People might also find it easier to seek help covering medical costs — which can be justified as non-negotiable, one-off emergencies — than other expenses.
He fears more patients will be driven to crowdfunding with the recent expiration of enhanced tax credits that helped reduce the cost of health insurance for most Affordable Care Act enrollees.
“Costs keep going up,” he said. “Coverage is still a struggle and probably getting worse.”
The second most common cause for crowdfunding donors was memorials or funerals. Following that category was groceries or other daily necessities, veterinary expenses or animal causes and natural disaster relief.
There are broad doubts, though, about whether the crowdfunding sites charge reasonable service fees.
The AP-NORC poll found that only 44% of U.S. adults are at least “somewhat” confident that the sites charge reasonable service fees.
“I just think it’s kind of crappy that people are in need and they charge a service fee,” said Maria Barrett, 68. “There ought to be a way to do that without it. But I guess there isn’t.”
Major for-profit fundraising sites say they only charge transaction fees to cover payment processing costs. GoFundMe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents off individuals' U.S. donations and solicits optional tips. GiveSendGo, a Christian alternative, similarly takes 2.7% and 30 cents.
There is a “pervasive sense” that platforms have “mandatory fees," apart from processing fees, Snyder said, when they largely do not. Consumers may associate companies with the larger platform fees they previously charged. In 2017, for example, GoFundMe dropped its 5% fee on those who launch personal campaigns.
“GoFundMe's model is intentionally designed to ensure the maximum amount of help goes directly to the people and nonprofits who need help, while giving donors the choice of whether to contribute anything additional for our services,” Sarah Peck, GoFundMe's vice president of communications, said in a statement.
More than half of U.S. adults were at least “somewhat” confident that people who raise money through crowdfunding sites really need the money, and about half were at least “somewhat” confident that they use it responsibly. But only about 1 in 10 were “very” or “extremely” confident.
Barrett sends money as long as she knows the organizers or is satisfied with her research on their campaigns. The New Jersey resident recently donated to a woman with brain cancer. Her son went to high school with the patient’s partner, she said, so she knew of their situation.
There was also the survivor of a house fire. “I know that the house was on fire because it was in my town,” she said.
She occasionally finds fundraiser goals to be “a little astronomical.” But she's seen the process work firsthand. After her son died, she said, her daughter-in-law received “more money than I could ever imagine” when someone started a campaign on his family's behalf.
Barrett's greater concern is with the factors that force people to resort to such lengths.
“I just wish it wasn’t so difficult for people to get help in this country without having to crowdsource and stuff,” she said. “One illness can wipe out a family. One death can wipe out a family. And that just doesn’t seem right in this country that’s supposed to be the best country in the world.”
Sanders reported from Washington.
Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of the AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,146 adults was conducted Dec. 4-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
FILE - The home page for the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is shown on a device in New York, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)
