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By MTB Cycling Gear Team

Zablotny Goes Back-to-Back at Red Bull Rampage 2026


Hayden Zablotny won the 2026 Red Bull Rampage on Saturday, October 10, in Virgin, Utah, with a 96.00 that held off Thomas Genon’s 94.35 and Tom Van Steenbergen’s 94.00. We closed out our Robin Goomes recap two days ago by flagging the men’s final as a separate story, still to come. This is that story, and the number worth sitting with isn’t the score. It’s the calendar: twelve months between his first Rampage run and his second.

Only one other men’s rider has ever gone back-to-back at this event, and he didn’t do it like this. Brandon Semenuk won in 2021 to become the first repeat champion, but that title followed one he’d already won in 2019 — plus two more from 2008 and 2016 before that, a factory contract, and over a decade spent as the rider everyone else built lines to beat. Zablotny had none of that runway. He won as a total unknown last October, and Saturday he had to prove that result wasn’t a fluke with one year of reputation behind him instead of ten.

Quick Take

WinnerHayden Zablotny (Canada), 96.00 — back-to-back champion (2025, 2026)
Runner-upThomas Genon (Belgium), 94.35
ThirdTom Van Steenbergen (Canada), 94.00 — 0.35 back from Genon
Zero scoresFour riders: Bienve Aguado Alba, Dylan Stark, Adolf Silva, Szymon Godziek
Awards without a podiumJaxson Riddle — GoPro Moment and Best Trick (backflip heel clicker)
VenueOriginal 2001 competition zone, Virgin, Utah — same ground as Goomes’ women’s final two days earlier
Best forAnyone who read our Rampage preview or the Goomes recap and wants the men’s result
Skip ifYou want a trick-by-trick line breakdown — this is a results story

The Field That Beat Itself

Four zeros. On a card of eighteen riders, four of them walked away with nothing on the scoreboard: Bienve Aguado Alba, Dylan Stark, Adolf Silva, and Szymon Godziek. That’s not a quiet statistic. It’s close to a quarter of the men’s field going down hard enough, or bailing late enough, that the judges had nothing to score.

Godziek’s zero stings a little more than the others, given the storyline we’d set up heading into the weekend. Our lineup preview pointed out that his brother Dawid had just won the first Slopestyle Super League title, and that Szymon’s own Demo was built for exactly this kind of big-mountain line. The bike was right. The run wasn’t.

Nobody in this field, Zablotny included, had thrown a competition run at the original 2001 zone before Saturday. Eighteen riders built lines on ground none of them had tested under pressure, and a quarter of the card paid for that blind spot with a zero. That’s what it looks like on a scoreboard when a return-to-the-roots venue actually rides like its reputation instead of just sounding good in a preview.

Zablotny’s Title Defense, in Two Numbers

96.00 and 1.65. The first is Zablotny’s winning score. The second is his margin over Genon, and it’s not a huge gap — Rampage finals rarely are at the top, since the field self-selects down to riders who can land the hardest line they built. But 1.65 points on a 100-point scale, after one run each in a finals format with no re-runs, is still a clean, decisive win. Nobody’s arguing the judges got this one close to wrong.

What makes it the harder defense isn’t the margin. It’s the position. Winning once as a rookie means you had nothing to protect and everything to prove. Winning again a year later means you’re the rider everyone else in the pits is building their line to beat, on a mountain you’ve never ridden competitively before, with a reputation now attached to your name instead of just a bike sponsor. Chromag signed Zablotny not long after his 2025 win, which tells you the industry read his first title as real rather than a fluke. Saturday is the confirmation.

Genon’s 94.35 is its own quietly impressive number — he was already a well-established Rampage veteran before this weekend, and his own build-up coverage out of BC showed a rider who’d clearly treated this edition as more than a routine title defense attempt. Second place on a course this unforgiving isn’t a letdown. It’s the second-best run turned in by eighteen riders on the hardest version of this event in 25 years.

Van Steenbergen’s Third Is the Closest Call on the Card

Tom Van Steenbergen’s 94.00 sat just 0.35 behind Genon — close enough that a single deduction, a slightly cleaner landing, or a marginally bigger trick on either run could have flipped second and third. That’s the margin that separates “great run” from “great run that got outscored by a slightly greater one,” and it’s the kind of gap Rampage judging produces when the top of a field is this deep. Van Steenbergen has been a pre-qualified fixture at this event for years now; a podium on the hardest version of the course the event has thrown at riders is a solid data point for a rider who doesn’t always get the headline.

Who Finished Where at Red Bull Rampage 2026?

The top of the men’s final broke down like this:

  1. Hayden Zablotny (Canada) — 96.00
  2. Thomas Genon (Belgium) — 94.35
  3. Tom Van Steenbergen (Canada) — 94.00
  4. Tomas Lemoine (France) — 93.66
  5. Reed Boggs (USA) — 90.33
  6. Talus Turk (USA) — 88.50

Below that, the card thins out fast — the drop from a top-six finish into the 70s, 60s, and eventually the four zeros further down the standings says more about how this course rode than any paragraph of description could.

The Rider Who Won Without a Podium

Jaxson Riddle didn’t crack the top six, but he’s walking away from Virgin with two awards: the GoPro Moment of the day and Best Trick, both for a backflip heel clicker that Pinkbike’s pit-side coverage had already been tracking since he opened up one of the event’s biggest canyon gaps earlier in the week. That’s the split that makes Rampage judging interesting to argue about every year — difficulty and spectacle don’t always line up with the overall score, because a trick that’s genuinely the best thing anyone did all day can still sit inside a run with enough small errors elsewhere to keep the total down. Riddle’s heel clicker is the run highlight reels will use. Zablotny’s whole run is the one that won.

What Zablotny’s Defense Actually Proves

Semenuk’s path to a repeat title ran through three prior wins and more than a decade of being the name every other rider in the pits measured their own line against. By the time he went back-to-back in 2021, nobody needed convincing that he belonged at the top of this sport. Zablotny’s path ran through exactly one prior result. A rookie win can always get waved off as a lucky day, a soft field, a panel that scored generously. A second win, produced twelve months later with the entire pit specifically building lines to beat him, doesn’t wave off the same way.

That’s the part of Saturday that matters most. Not that the course was hard — eighteen riders and four zeros already made that case on their own. It’s that the rider who won it as a nobody is still standing now that the whole sport knows his name.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone who read the Goomes recap and wanted the other half of the weekend. This is the men’s result — Zablotny’s 96.00, Genon’s 94.35, Van Steenbergen’s 94.00, and the four zeros that tell you how hard this course actually rode.

Anyone tracking Zablotny since his 2025 breakout. A rookie win invites skepticism. A title defense on unfamiliar terrain against a stacked field answers most of it.

Freeride fans who want to know how unforgiving the 25th-anniversary course was. Four zeros out of eighteen riders is the most direct evidence available, and it’s not a number this event produces every year.

Who Should Skip This

Readers wanting a trick-by-trick breakdown of Zablotny’s winning line. This is a results and context piece, not a feature-by-feature course analysis.

Anyone who already read our lineup preview and just wants new information. The field, the venue, and the stakes here are exactly what we laid out before the weekend started — this post is about what the riders did with it.

The Bottom Line

Hayden Zablotny beat Thomas Genon by 1.65 points — 96.00 to 94.35 — to become only the second men’s rider ever to defend a Red Bull Rampage title, with Tom Van Steenbergen’s 94.00 rounding out the podium just 0.35 behind Genon. Four riders — Bienve Aguado Alba, Dylan Stark, Adolf Silva, and Szymon Godziek — scored zero, evidence of how little room the original 2001 venue left for error. Jaxson Riddle walked away with the GoPro Moment and Best Trick awards for a backflip heel clicker without cracking the top six, proof that the best single trick of the day and the best overall run don’t always belong to the same rider. Brandon Semenuk had three prior titles and a decade of reputation before he managed back-to-back; Zablotny had one rookie win and twelve months, and Saturday’s run says that was enough.


Reporting sourced from Red Bull’s official Rampage results page, St. George News’ coverage of Zablotny’s 2025 rookie win, Red Bull’s recap of Brandon Semenuk’s 2021 back-to-back win, Pinkbike’s coverage of Jaxson Riddle’s canyon gap, Pinkbike’s report on Thomas Genon’s BC warm-up, and Pinkbike’s report on Chromag signing Zablotny.