Shaun White shakes off early fall, joins two other Americans in halfpipe final
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Shaun White’s final Olympic run is a half-court game winner combined with a Hail Mary touchdown with the feel of a bottom-of-the-ninth home run. When there’s no time left, no margin for error, nothing but victory or devastation, he somehow keeps coming through.
White fell in his first qualifying run attempting to reach the finals of Olympic halfpipe at Beijing, leaving him just one chance to avoid a humiliating early end to his final Games. But with all the pressure on him, with his own demons chirping in his head, with nothing left between him and the rest of his non-competitive life but one final race … Shaun White threw down yet another masterpiece.
The three-time gold medalist and five-time Olympian now joins Team USA teammates Taylor Gold and Chase Josey in Friday’s finals. The fourth team member, Lucas Foster, ended up missing the final.
For well over an hour, it seemed White’s historic career could end with a whimper. He fell late in his first run attempting a Double McTwist, his signature move.
“Just a few more inches and I would have had it,” he said, “and there I was, sliding on my back thinking ‘Wow, it’s going to come down to this last run.’”
As younger riders piled up scores far higher than his, pushing him farther and farther away from the top 12, White could only sit and let the negative thoughts circulate in his head.
“I thought about my friends and family back home watching on TV,” he said. “I was thinking a lot about, if that run went terribly, doing this press line, talking to everyone over and over about how ‘I’m still happy to be here, but sucks I can’t go to finals.’”
But then White did what he always does: He stuffed the fears down and rose to meet the moment. On his second run, he nailed back-to-back double cork 1080s — two diagonal flips, three total rotations — and then delivered a McTwist encore far more assured and confident than his first attempt. He ended the qualifying session ranked fourth, trailing only Japan’s Ayumu Hirano, Australia’s Scotty James and Japan’s Ruka Hirano (no relation to Ayumu).
White now has three more runs left in his career; he’s announced his intention to walk away from competition altogether after these Olympics. He hopes he’ll have the chance to put some pressure on his younger rivals.
“I’ll have bigger and better tricks I want to pull out for finals, and that’s the best part of it,” he said. “I’m going to be giving it my all every run, putting pressure on the other riders because I drop in before them.”
White didn’t say whether he planned to attempt a triple cork, currently the most difficult trick in snowboarding. Ayumu Hirano landed it in a December competition, but no one has yet used it to win. White might need to pull it out of his bag in order to hold off the other riders.
“The name of the game right now is landing on your feet,” he said. “A triple is yet to win one of these big events. Not to discredit it because it’s really heavy, but I definitely want to put in what I came to do, and then if I got some extra runs to play around, we’re going to play around with it.”
