Shaun White: Attack of the Flying Tomato
AN OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL DOESN’T COME WITH AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL, A TUBE OF metal polish or even a box. Shaun White, nineteen-year-old snowboarder champion, earned his golden medallion with a bravura performance on an Italian halfpipe. Now he’s trying to figure out: What do you do with the damn thing? He expounds on some of the possibilities. He could never take it off, eventually developing a medal-shaped tan line on his chest. He could use it as a backstage pass for everything in life: If a waitress ever hesitated to add eggs to his breakfast order, he could whip out the medal. Then the impressed waitress, White explains, would say, “I’ll see what I can do.” But one option, seems strongest. With a crooked grin, White says, “I could hang it from the rearview mirror of my car.”
White is cool enough to enjoy the notion of bringing home a medal smeared with grape jelly and bread crumbs — but not so cool that he was able to hold back the tears at the medal ceremony. (“I wasn’t crying, dude,” he insists. “I had some tears come out,” he explains, making a distinction so subtle as to be nonexistent.) In his nineteen years of life on this planet, he’s seen snowboarding evolve from outlaw sport to extreme-athletics juggernaut. Not long ago, it seemed like an awkward, pandering idea for the Olympics to have snowboarder at all. Now snowboard events are a highlight of the schedule.
Snowboarding, once a good way to get ejected from ski resorts, has gone mainstream. In no small part, that’s because of White’s shaggy charm and the amazing feats of twisting airborne ballet he can perform with a plank of wood strapped to his feet.
White is a master of the 1080, meaning he can do three full rotations of 360 degrees after launching himself into the air. He concedes that “1080s are cool, but they’re not that fun to do. They’re hard and pretty technical. What’s most fun for me is really big jumps and long, slow spins.” That’s not how one wins professional events, but it’s what the sport is really about for White. He says, “I can have fun if there’s a little snow bump, and me and my friends, we’re just trying back flips and landing on our heads, you know what I mean? Honestly, I think that the way to become the best is just to have fun.”
When White walks into a room, he barely seems to be expending any energy at all. His gait is halfway between a graceful professional athlete’s and a slouching teenager’s. (Even standing up straight, he’s only five foot eight and around 140 pounds.) But when he thinks something’s funny — an episode of Family Guy, or his brother, Jesse, clowning around with, an oversize cowboy hat — he jerks to life like there’s an electrical current running through his veins.
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