Aaron Gwin won the Pro Men’s final at the Fox US Open of Mountain Biking in 2:42.250 on Saturday, and Gloria Scarsi took the Pro Women’s title in 3:06.231. Deer Valley’s first year hosting this race got its first-ever winners, and neither of them was the rider who topped Friday’s seeding sheet. We covered Bald Eagle Mountain’s debut and the pro seeding order yesterday. This is the part where the actual racing decided who leaves Utah with a trophy.

Gwin beat Evan Medcalf by 0.333 seconds. Scarsi beat Kallie Stewart by 4.845. One of those margins is a nail-biter. The other isn’t close at all — and both stories are worth their own section.

Quick Take

Pro Men’s winner	Aaron Gwin, 2:42.250
Men’s margin	0.333s over Evan Medcalf (2nd), 0.728s over Mack Manietta (3rd)
Pro Women’s winner	Gloria Scarsi, 3:06.231
Women’s margin	4.845s over Kallie Stewart (2nd), 5.516s over Mary Mclarnon (3rd)
Seeding leaders	Nate Kitchen (2:41.942) and Aletha Ostgaard (3:06.072) — neither won the final
Notable podium finish	Mack Manietta, 15, took 3rd in the Pro Men’s field
Venue	Deer Valley Resort, Bald Eagle Mountain — first year hosting this race
Best for	Anyone who read our seeding preview and wants the finals payoff
Skip if	You’re looking for amateur/Open Class results — those run Sunday

Gwin Closes the Gap Kitchen Left Him

Friday’s seeding sheet had Nate Kitchen on top at 2:41.942, with Gwin sitting second, just 0.350 seconds back. That’s the kind of gap a rider can close on a good day. Gwin closed it and then some — his winning final run, 2:42.250, was actually a hair faster than his own seeding time from the day before, which isn’t a guarantee at this level. A lot of riders back off their seeding pace once the pressure of a single winner-take-all run sets in. Gwin sped up.

Evan Medcalf crossed 0.333 seconds behind at 2:42.583. Medcalf rides for Commencal-Schwalbe by Les Orres, and this result follows a season where he already picked up his first World Cup top-15 and a Vice U.S. Championship finish — a rider trending upward, and a genuinely close second place against a five-time World Cup overall champion, not a distant runner-up.

Third place is where this podium gets strange in the best way. Mack Manietta finished 2:42.978, just 0.728 seconds off the win — and Manietta is 15 years old. He’s part of the Generation Specialized development program, mentored by World Cup racer and World Championship medalist Finn Iles, and he’d already gone undefeated at the Cannonball MTB Festival and posted the third-fastest time of any category at Crankworx Whistler’s Air DH this year. None of that fully explains standing on a pro podium at a national championship finale against Aaron Gwin. Sometimes a result just says a kid is fast. This is one of those.

We wrote up Gwin’s Frameworks Racing/TRP frame when it launched — a $3,999 gravity chassis built to undercut the field on price without giving up performance. He signed with Frameworks specifically to mentor teammate Asa Vermette for 2026 and 2027, calling it a possible final chapter of his career. A season-finale win at a brand-new venue, on the bike his own program builds, isn’t a bad way to write that chapter.

Scarsi’s Downhill Conversion Pays Off

Gloria Scarsi’s 3:06.231 beat Kallie Stewart’s 3:11.076 by 4.845 seconds. Mary Mclarnon took third at 3:11.747. That margin isn’t a photo finish — it’s a statement.

Scarsi’s path to that statement is the more interesting story than the final time. She started as a road cyclist in Italy, winning national and European titles before switching to gravity racing in 2020. By 2023 she’d finished fourth overall in the Enduro World Cup with two podiums. Then, in April 2024, she announced she was leaving enduro for downhill entirely — a discipline switch that doesn’t always pay off this fast. Two years later, she’s a US Open downhill champion at a venue that had never hosted this race before. That’s not a slow burn. That’s a rider who made a bet on a new discipline and won a National Championship-caliber final on it inside two seasons.

Kallie Stewart’s second place and Mclarnon’s third round out a podium that also included Scarsi in Friday’s seeding — she sat fourth behind Ostgaard, Anna Newkirk, and Kailey Skelton. Moving from fourth in seeding to first in the final is exactly the kind of jump a one-run, no-margin-for-error format makes possible, and exactly why seeding position and final result aren’t the same conversation.

What Made Deer Valley’s First US Open Finals Notable?

1. Neither seeding leader won. Nate Kitchen topped Friday’s men’s seeding by 0.350 seconds over Gwin; Aletha Ostgaard led the women by 0.528 over Newkirk. Both got beaten on the day that counted.
2. A 15-year-old made the men’s pro podium. Mack Manietta’s third place, 0.728 seconds off Gwin’s winning time, is a legitimate result against a full elite field, not a junior-category footnote.
3. The women’s final wasn’t close. Scarsi’s 4.845-second margin over second place is a bigger gap than most World Cup downhill finals produce over a full field, let alone a top two.
4. It’s the first finals this specific race has ever run on this mountain. Four years of Killington history didn’t transfer — Saturday’s results are the entire competitive record Deer Valley has for this event.

Where the Seeding Leaders Landed

Kitchen and Ostgaard both had the fastest bike on the mountain on Friday. Neither had it on Saturday. We don’t have their exact finishing positions from the final results we’ve reviewed, and we’re not going to guess at a number we can’t confirm — but the podiums are clear enough on their own: no Kitchen among the top three men, no Ostgaard among the top three women. Seeding runs happen alone against the clock, with no direct competitor on track and no finals-day crowd noise. Whatever changed for both riders between Friday and Saturday, it changed enough to open the door for Gwin, Medcalf, Manietta, Scarsi, Stewart, and Mclarnon to walk through it.

Deer Valley’s Debut, One Race Later

We flagged in the seeding preview that Deer Valley was taking on a national championship-caliber field with zero prior data on how the course would hold up under race pressure. One finals day in, the answer is: it held up fine. A five-time World Cup overall champion posted his fastest run of the weekend on it. A 15-year-old development rider ran within a second of that time. The margins in both fields — tight up front for the men, blown open for the women — look like a track that rewards committing to a line, not one that’s still getting sorted out in year one.

That’s a different kind of debut than Whistler’s first-ever UCI Downhill World Cup, which had decades of the venue’s own bike park history to lean on even without a World Cup date attached. Deer Valley had none of that. Bald Eagle Mountain went from a course nobody had raced to a course that produced a competitive, well-separated set of results in the space of two days. However this event’s second year goes, the debut did its job.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone who read yesterday’s seeding preview. This is the answer to the question that piece left open — who actually wins when the pressure run happens.

Fans of the Frameworks Racing/TRP story. Gwin’s win is the payoff to a program built partly around him mentoring a first-year elite teammate, on a frame the team builds itself.

Anyone tracking discipline-switch stories in gravity racing. Scarsi’s move from road cycling to enduro to downhill, capped by a US Open title two years after switching disciplines, is a faster payoff than most riders who make that jump ever see.

Who Should Skip This

Anyone looking for amateur or Open Class results. Those races run Sunday, a full day after the pro finals covered here.

Riders wanting full split-time breakdowns for every finisher. We’ve reported the top-three gaps in both fields; a complete field-wide time sheet is better suited to the race organizer’s own results page than to this recap.

The Bottom Line

Aaron Gwin and Gloria Scarsi are the first-ever Fox US Open champions crowned at Deer Valley, and both wins came with a twist the seeding sheet didn’t predict. Gwin ran down a 0.350-second deficit from Friday to beat Evan Medcalf by 0.333 on Saturday, with 15-year-old Mack Manietta rounding out a podium nobody saw coming from a development rider. Scarsi turned a fourth-place seeding run into a 4.845-second demolition of the women’s field, two years after walking away from enduro entirely. Nate Kitchen and Aletha Ostgaard topped Friday’s times and still went home without the win neither saw coming. Killington’s four-year run at this event is over. Deer Valley’s first year just delivered a finals day that didn’t need the old venue’s history to make it worth watching.

---

Reporting sourced from Pinkbike’s coverage of the 2026 US Open downhill finals, TownLift’s pro seeding results, BikeMag’s report on Gloria Scarsi’s move to downhill, Commencal’s rider page for Evan Medcalf, and Bikerumor’s report on Aaron Gwin joining Frameworks Racing/TRP.