Where are they now? Aleš Valenta

The Czech athlete flipped into history with the world’s first quint aerial. 

When Aleš Valenta clicked into his skis for the men’s Olympic aerials final at Deer Valley, Utah, on February 19, 2002, he had never won a World Cup event. But the ski media knew that the 25-year-old Czech might throw a trick never before seen at the Games.

Photo top of page: A gymnast as a teen, Aleš Valenta joined a local freestyle team and never looked back. His gymnastics training helped him land the first “quint” (five twists and three flips) in Olympic competition at the 2002 Games, which earned him a gold.

It would be “the quint:” five twists and three flips. Valenta had been honing the move since the summer of 1998. Even though he had never landed it cleanly in competition, he had so much confidence that it was the first trick he practiced on the water jump each morning.

After the first jump of the 12-man Olympic final, Valenta was tied for fifth place—just 3.34 points behind the leader, 1998 Olympic gold medalist Eric Bergoust of the United States. A two-jump total would determine the winner.

At the top of the inrun, Valenta adjusted his gloves. History was about to change. He shot straight up the ramp, twisted twice on flip one, twice on flip two and once more on the final flip before touching down solidly in a small poof of snow and pine boughs. The score: 129.98—0.40 points less than Bergoust’s first (and easier) jump.

Judges wanted to see a separation between each flip-twist combination, and “from what I remember, he finished his first twist late,” says Olympic aerialist and 1995 world champion Trace Worthington. “The judges probably saw that and thought, ‘Now [he’s] using the second flip to do two-and-a-half twists almost.’” Still, adds Worthington, “You do a quint and land it? Just hand him the gold! I don’t care how much he blended anything. Just give it to him.”

American competitor Joe Pack, who had yet to jump, was stunned. “The two times Aleš tried it on snow pre-Olympics, it didn’t go very well,” he remembers “We all knew that. So when he did it, it was unbelievable. I was so pumped for him.”

Bergoust recalls hearing Valenta’s score while on the hill. “I did the math and realized I needed the highest score I’d ever gotten for my next jump,” he says. “I told myself, ‘Don’t be slow. I got one gold already. I don’t want silver. Gold or nothing.’ I got a little too much speed, was a little too aggressive on takeoff, went too big, ended up not landing and got 12th—last place in the finals. Aleš was a big part of that.”

Valenta won and proved that the quint was possible. Still, it took years before others caught on. American Jeret “Speedy” Peterson executed the only quint at the 2006 Torino Games and placed seventh. At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Peterson, again, did the sole quint and took silver. Finally, 20 years after Valenta’s victory, five of the top six men completed quints at the 2022 Beijing Games. But no one has claimed an Olympic medal with the same sequence as Valenta did.

Getting Airborne

Valenta grew up in what is now Czechia, about 200 miles east of Prague. He was a gymnast until age 15 or 16, when a high school friend told him about freestyle skiing. At the tryouts, says Valenta, “They took everyone who had legs and arms who could ski and walk; luckily, I was one of them.”

He also had talent. “The minute he was in the air, he knew what to do,” says Ladislav Lettovsky, Valenta’s first freestyle coach. When Valenta was ready, Lettovsky sent him to a water-ramp competition in Vienna.

Valenta arrived early, so he took a nap under a trampoline. A man knocked on the canvas to make sure he was alive. This man, as it turned out, was Vladimir Aleynik, head coach of the Austrian aerials team and a two-time Olympic diver who had won two medals for the Soviet Union on the 10-meter platform (1976 bronze, 1980 silver).

After the contest, the ramp owner told Valenta he liked his style and that he could train for free in Vienna. Eventually, Aleynik offered him a chance to train along with the Austrian national team, and by age 20, Valenta was competing on the World Cup. “I was really lucky,” he says. “I had a lot of help from the very beginning,” even, much to his surprise, at the elite level.

Valenta still remembers when overall freestyle world champion Darcy Downs warned him at the top of the hill about a huge wind that was about to sweep in. Valenta was stunned that a rival would offer advice on game day. “In tennis, that would be like a guy telling you in advance, ‘I’m gonna serve to your backhand,’” he says. (Valenta always traveled with tennis racquets on the ski tour.)

Valenta missed the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games while in mandatory Czech military service. He made his Olympic debut in 1998 in Nagano, at age 25. “I was not in Japan as a top-five guy,” Valenta recalls. “It was like 50-50 I could make the finals.” Improbably, he placed fourth overall, behind Bergoust, Sébastien Foucras of France and Dmitry Dashinski of Belarus. “I was super-happy!” Valenta says. “Those guys before me all deserved to beat me. I was pushed until the very last jump by Dmitry.”

Suddenly, Valenta was quasi-famous. He claims that the only other Czech athlete the international press wanted to interview in Nagano was Jaromir Jagr, who was already an NHL star with the Pittsburgh Penguins and had just helped the nation win its first Olympic hockey gold medal.

Valenta’s success also had a downside. Aleynik—the man who taught him how to flip and twist properly and transformed him from a gymnast into a real aerialist—told him, “Now you are starting to beat my [Austrian] guys, so I cannot coach you anymore.” About a year later, Valenta teamed up with Pavel Landa, who had been a top ballet skier. (The FIS discontinued that discipline in 2000.)

Birth of the Quint

In 1998, most of the male aerialists were winning with quads: four twists executed over three somersaults. To be different, Valenta had one option: add a fifth twist. But where in the jump’s sequence?

That summer, he toyed with its placement. Originally, he tried to do one twist on the first flip, three on the second and one on the third (in short, a 1-3-1 sequence)—the same pattern that would later become “the Hurricane,” Speedy Peterson’s signature move. In 1999, when Valenta tried it on a water ramp, he found that the 1-3-1 didn’t suit him. “It was easier than doing 2-2-1,” he says, referring to his gold medal–winning quint, “but I didn’t have much time to focus on the landing.”

What makes performing a double twist on the first flip insanely difficult, Worthington explains, is that “you’re going off a jump that’s a 71-degree pitch. You’re taking off horizontally [parallel to the ground], so you’ve already finished a quarter of your flip, and by the time you initiate the first twist, you’re upside down, so you really have to finish two twists in [the remaining] half-flip. That’s crazy!”

The physics also make it hard to show the clear separation
that judges require between each flip. “But for me,” Valenta says, “[2-2-1] worked well”—even if it took him three years to polish it.

To fine-tune his timing, Valenta studied another sport with fast twists and flips: diving. He noticed that when a diver twists quickly, he has one arm bent behind his head and his other arm on the stomach. Adopting a similar arm position was crucial. “That’s why I could perfect the double-full, double-full, full,” he said, using aerials jargon for the 2-2-1.

In 2001, Valenta first landed the quint on snow, in Norway, before the World Cup season. He also landed one (badly) at a World Cup in Whistler, Canada, 22 days before the 2002 Olympic final. Still, he says, “My confidence was high. The only thing that could stop me from doing it in [the Olympics] was weather. If there would be wind or snowing, I was not stupid enough to risk my life.”

Conditions were perfect, so at around 1:00 pm on February 19, 2002, Valenta unleashed the quint, found his feet and won his nation’s only gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

After Olympic Gold

Later, the Czech national postal service issued a stamp in Valenta’s honor (alas, with the wrong bib number). That June, he opened Acrobat Park, a modern training facility that he still runs in Štíty, about 15 miles from his hometown. In 2003, Valenta married Elen Černá, a model and television sportscaster who had interviewed him after his Olympic win. That summer, they had a son, Denis, who now plays Division III hockey at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota in Winona. In 2004, their daughter, Amelie, was born. She became a figure skater and powerlifter.

All the while, Valenta kept training hard. He scored his first World Cup win (finally) in Fernie, Canada, in January 2003, nearly a year after his Olympic victory. It would be another year before he landed on top of the podium again, also in Fernie, in January 2004. His third and final World Cup victory came on September 5, 2004, at Mt. Buller in Australia—but it was not an auspicious sign.

That year, Valenta’s back pain intensified to the point where, he says, “I had to take so much pills against the pain that [they would cause] normal people to probably fall asleep. But I was jumping with it. When you do something which you love so much, it’s really, really hard to just leave.

Then, while training at a World Cup in the Czech Republic, he overrotated his quint and tore ligaments in his knee. “It was super painful,” he says. “So every jump at the 2006 Olympics, I was getting an injection into my knee just to go on the hill and jump. The timing was terrible.”

Just one week after placing 21st at the Torino Olympics, Valenta finished third at a World Cup event and placed third again, two weeks later. If he’d had one more week to heal, who knows what might have happened at Torino?

Even now, he says, “I believe many people thought I was just kind of acting in Torino. The pain in my knee was so, so bad for like just 10 seconds after every jump. I could walk no problem, but whenever I landed—after falling out of the sky about 13 meters, like the fourth story of a building—I collapsed totally.”

By 2007, Valenta’s back pain grew so bad, it was hard for him to sleep and walk. “I couldn’t bear it without painkillers,” he says. “But I didn’t want to quit as a quitter.” So he hung on until the 2007 World Championships in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, where he placed eighth, and that was it.

Then the phone rang.

A Crazy-Busy Retirement

A rep from Star Dance—the Czech version of Dancing with the Stars—was calling again. When the show had contacted him earlier, Valenta had an excuse: He was still competing. “When I retired, they caught me unguarded,” he says.

And untrained. “I’d call myself a ‘bar dancer,’” he says. “It means you’re standing next to the bar. You have a drink in one hand. The second hand is gently leaning on the bar, and you just move your head up and down. This is the dancer I am—or used to be.”

Nevertheless, he and his partner won the show—with one caveat. “I put it into the contract that I’m not gonna wear those fishnet Latino-guy things. If I wear something, it’s gonna be approved by me. That was my only condition.” One day, as Valenta recalls it, “a lady wanted to put me in some crazy-colored half-naked thing” [saying] ‘You must wear it! It’s in your contract.’ I said, ‘See? We deleted it.’ She was so surprised because no one else ever thought of it.”

Still drawn to television, Valenta started a production company; he hosted and directed a children’s sports show and was on air in an automotive show similar to Top Gear. He also began doing PR and marketing for a company he co-owns that promotes the healing properties of molecular hydrogen.

At the same time, Valenta has been trying to grow the popularity of aerials and widen his perspective on the sport beyond purely the athlete’s view. On top of owning Acrobat Park, he became a FIS representative, FIS judge and FIS technical delegate, and is currently the head of the Czech aerials team. Occasionally he travels to Europa Cup events and junior world championships.

In the three years since he took over the Czech aerials program, says Valenta, “We’ve grown to 40, 50 kids. At the moment, we’re the fastest-growing nation in aerials.” His next big goal, he says, “is to find a ski resort that will build us good ramps or where we can train on snow.” But the best part, he adds, is that freestyle includes many different disciplines to keep kids interested. “You can start with moguls and become good in aerials because you still have two jumps on a mogul course, or the other way around.”

He also reaches out to gymnastics clubs to expose those athletes to acrobatics on skis and, as he puts it, “give them a chance to be one of the best in the world at an age where, in many other sports, it’s all over. If you start gymnastics at 15, 16, you will never become an Olympian. But with aerials, you can start at 15, 16, 17, even 18 and still become an Olympian. Not only an Olympian, but you can win the Olympics,” he says. “So I recruit for freestyle. I don’t want to push the kids towards aerials but, of course, this is where my heart is.” 

Aimee Berg, a longtime Olympic sportswriter based out of New York City, wrote about Benjamin Raich in the March-April 2025 issue.