Shaun White: Big Hair, Big Air and the Killer Inside
Each morning during the Olympics, Shaun White tried to grab shotgun in the Team USA van headed to the mountain, but fifth-placer Louie Vito always beat him to it. “It pissed me off so much, because that meant he got to control the music,” White says with a slight smile. “He’d play stuff he knew I hated, like Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party in the U.S.A.,’ which is just painful. It’s bumming me out even thinking about it.” White was the snowboarder to beat in Vancouver – he’s been that guy forever, actually – so it wasn’t a bad idea to try to psych him out. Vito played a lot of Miley, every day, plus Dr. Dre and terrifyingly long bouts of reggae. “A lot of guys on the team are so into reggae,” says White. “They’d all be like, ‘Yeah, bumbaclot nation!’ I’d just be sitting there, like, ‘Jesus.'” He shudders. “They knew that all I wanted to hear was rock & roll.”
White may rule snowboarding, one of the coolest youth cultures in America, but he’s such a bundle of energy, ambition, discipline and competitiveness that the sport doesn’t quite express who he wants to be. Rock fandom, as it turns out, is essential to White’s “new zone, my whole new deal,” as he puts it. “Getting into music has changed my personality and way of doing things,” he says. “I’m far more open now.”
Tonight, no longer encumbered by the capacious red-white-and-blue jerseys of Team USA, White’s arms are festooned with a main-stage wristband he’s been wearing since last year’s Coachella festival, a red-and-black cloth bracelet from a vintage-rock store, and a lot of heavy silver jewelry, including an onyx cuff that’s similar to one owned by Robert Plant, his musical hero and all-around obsession. (His favorite song in the world is Led Zeppelin‘s “Whole Lotta Love.”) White’s jacket is black leather, baby-skin soft and cut to highlight muscle. “I met Matt Sorum from Guns n’ Roses in L.A., and he told me to come by his clothing store on Melrose,” says White, digging his hands into his pockets. “Apparently, Slash only smokes a certain kind of cigarette, but they’re super-long, so he made the pocket on this jacket extra long to fit them. As soon as I heard that, I was like, ‘I’ll take it! I’ll take it!'” He breaks into a grin. “Then, since I was in the presence of rock heroes, I decided that I had to get the pants to match.”
So here he is, our leather-ensembled two-time gold medalist über rock fan, 23, holding court with his team manager, bodyguard and two PR reps at a table in an upscale bistro in downtown Manhattan a day after leaving Vancouver, with only a brief stop in Chicago to school Oprah in the rigors of the double McTwist 1260: his showstopping trick, made up of two flips and three and a half spins, that he stuck at the Olympics after he won the gold – a “righteous victory lap,” as he put it. With his flowing carrot top, White, who stands five feet nine and is built like a bantamweight boxer, is recognizable from across any room, and bejeweled matrons keep rushing over to offer him a big thumbs up. A waitress nearly pees her pants reading him the specials. “I used to hate on New York because it was cold and I didn’t understand it, but now it’s one of my favorite places,” says White. “After the Turin Olympics four years ago, I went to Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game. They put me on the JumboTron, and the whole place stood up. It was unbelievable. I sat down, and I was shaking.”
His first gold medal at Turin in 2006 may have blown White’s mind, but the second one cemented his reputation as athletic and pop-culture legend. “Honestly, I’m never that proud of my performances, but this time at the Olympics feels different,” he says. “I was able to get that last run in on the pipe, and I think that truly affected people. It showed something about myself to them, something more than what they knew.”
Before he digs into a New York strip steak, White messes around with his iPhone, scrolling through some messages. He stops at a picture of Vice President Joe Biden at a news conference in Vancouver, with a video screen set up behind him to show clips of medalists’ performances. “Man, I worked so hard to set this picture up right,” says White, wriggling with excitement. “Check it out,” he guffaws. “I’m shredding on the VP’s head.”
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