Shaun White makes his final ride as a competitive snowboarder here in Beijing on 11 February and Olympics.com recently sat down with the five-time Olympian and three-time champion to gauge his feelings ahead of his last halfpipe hurrah -- and find out if he thinks he's got what he needs to go out on top.
(2018 Getty Images)
The end is near for snowboarding legend Shaun White. The only question is how will it end?
Not only will these be the American’s last Olympic Games, but, as he announced late last week in a tearful press conference, these cruises through the halfpipe at the Genting Snow Park will be his last as a competitive snowboarder.
“Everything's got this glow on it because it's my last time,” he told Olympics.com in an interview in January, just on the cusp of his fifth and final Olympic Games. “It's just like the way that the world spins.”
He's already taken two of his five final passes through the pipe – the apparatus with which he's become synonymous over the course of the last two decades. He fell on his first run in Monday's qualifiers. All looked bleak then and it seemed, perhaps, like time had caught up with the oldest of all 25 men's competitors.
But he looked his old self an hour later when he dropped in for his second run. White flew and spun freely and turned back the years.
If we use history as a guide, the 35-year-old will fly highest and best and walk off into a dramatic Beijing sunset in the finals. If it were a movie, that's how it would end. But maybe that’s only nostalgia for this three-time gold-medal winner – the defending champion from a last-gasp victory in PyeongChang four years ago, who we’ve seen grow up from a teenage Flying Tomato on the Olympic stage.
There’s no denying what he’s done in the sport. He's a legend by any measure. Five Olympic Games. Three gold medals. More X Games crowns than anyone else. Ever.
But according to recent results, and with an exciting realignment at the top of the sport, White might not even be among the pre-finals favourites -- despite pulling it together for an admittedly impressive fourth-place finish in the qualifiers.
Since his gold-medal run in PyeongChang, he spent three and a half years without even entering a contest. When he did, he found a world on the verge of transformation – changes afoot cruel to a body closer to 40 than 20 in a sport that punishes mistakes, or folly, with catastrophe.
“I just physically can't train like I used to,” said a wistful White via video chat from his home, open to discussing the future and the past – and the present moment of doubt and possibility he finds himself in. “So now I kind of pick my battles. It's like a new chess board has been laid out and it's like, ‘OK, well, you can't go to these spaces anymore’. There's still a path, but you just got to find it.”
“I mean, this is…over 20 years of my life, you can't just put your head down and grind through for 20 years straight, it just doesn't work,” White continued back in January, still then recovering from a case of COVID-19 – of particular concern to him because of a heart condition and childhood asthma.
But isn’t the legend of Shaun White more than ageing flesh and bone? Doesn’t that special essence of an Olympic champion of such rare stature transcend the indignities of time and grind?
Well, no. Or yes. Maybe?
There were voices saying he was too old in PyeongChang in 2018 too. But now there are young guns in the pipe, armed with unbearable new stuff. The triple cork, for instance, has been flirted with by young Japanese sensation Hirano Ayumu, who finished with silver (his second) just behind White in PyeongChang.
The first time we saw it, at the Dew Tour in Colorado in December of last year, White was battling for a place on the U.S. team he had come to dominate. A fall. A broken binding and, then, the image of Hirano, flying through four full rotations and three off-axis flips in the dry air over Copper Mountain.
(2014 Getty Images)
It smelled a lot like a decade ago when the double cork changed everything – a seismic shift in the sport of halfpipe snowboarding. But this time it wasn’t Shaun White doing the innovating. He’s doing the looking up, mouth open, seeing the terrifying future unfold.
“The tricks have changed,” said White, who hasn’t won a competition since that final run in PyeongChang, in the Republic of Korea, four years ago. “The competitors have changed. You know...I think it's just a natural part of...getting older.”
He’s been on only one podium this season – and that bronze came in the Laax Open in Switzerland, where he was still trying to land a place on a Team USA that will, two days from now, have to consider a future without Shaun White.
“Pyeongchang was really sort of finding the love of the sport," he said of his last dance with Olympic gold, which came four years after Sochi 2014, where he failed to even finish on the podium (a first and last for him). "And, you know, what I consider, at least for me...trying to do something legendary. Look at the amount of time I've been in the sport and to come back from an upset to win, I mean, that's what sports is all about.”
It’s been noted that the only time White's tried a triple cork was back in 2013, in training, and he ended up in hospital and seriously injured for his efforts.
“This is that last dance,” he said, in a kind of conversation with an earlier version of himself that would “put his head down and charge” at his goal. “This is that sort of bonus round. It's something that I didn't think I was going to be attending, and I'm still in the mix. I'm still strong and motivated and ready to ride.”
He already avoided the indignity of missing the Olympic finals – which would have been a first in his five tries. And now, with three runs between himself and immortality, there's no telling what might happen.
"And so, yeah, I think this is like the icing on the cake," he continued, considering how so many things have changed in his two decades in the sport – from sleeping in a van in the parking lot of Mammoth Mountain to owning a piece of it. “It's all good either way for me, and I'm really just kind of enjoying it.”
But could this placid attitude all be a ruse? A clever gambit by Shaun White, who, like so many times before, is hiding a trick or two – perhaps the dreaded triple cork – up the sleeve of his parka? Who’d doubt it – even if it is unlikely in the face of the three Hiranos from Team Japan and Australia's Scotty James in peerless present form?
“I think with that sort of relaxed approach, it makes me more, I don't want to say dangerous, but more motivated, more like, you know, there's really nothing to prove,” he kept on.
“I'm cool to just make the team and go wave and say hi and be a part of the show, you know, but that's not who I am,” added White near the end of an open conversation, seemingly asking the same questions as his fans – and fans of the sport he’s come to dominate. “And that's not what's going to happen.
“Obviously, I'm going to...give it everything I have in my last run,” he added. “When I show up, I want to win. It doesn't matter if it's cards, if it's like, dice, if it's whatever, I want to win. And that's something that's just inside of me. And so going into this Olympics, obviously, I want to win. I'm pushing to win.”
“My track record showed that...when it is really time to put things down, I can do it,” he said, nearing the end. “I'm trying to...line it all up so that...I have something special to show and that that might win me the Olympics.”
But one big question still trumps all the rest. It’s a question that echoes. How much of the old Shaun White remains?
The kid from Carlsbad, California with shocks of red hair swirling out from under his cap like a storm. The competitor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. How much of that Shaun White is left?
These are questions only the big moment can answer.
(2022 Getty Images)