SHAUN AND ONLY
Veteran star crushes it, wins halfpipe for Americans’ 100th
American snowboarder Shaun White, trailing and down to his last run in the halfpipe finals in the Winter Games on Wednesday, slices through the South Korean sky with an electrifying performance to post a score of 97.75 to win the third gold medal of his career. Also, the medal marked the 100th overall gold for the U.S. in the Winter Games.
Boxing had its pivotal rumble in BONGPYEONG, SOUTH K OREA » the jungle. Snowboarding now has its climactic contest. Call it pandemonium in the pipe. ¶ With the world’s best boarders spinning and flipping down the Olympic halfpipe Wednesday, it was Shaun White who claimed victory with a linking of two of the hardest tricks possible — a pair of gargantuan double-cork 1440s.
Those tricks sent him past Japan’s Ayumu Hirano and Australia’s Scotty James in a duel for the ages.
That frontside 1440 was the same trick that sent him to a hospital in October after a brutal slam in a New Zealand halfpipe mangled his face, requiring 62 stitches to repair. He almost quit snowboarding after that crash. His journey to South Korea — which included a renewed focus on snowboarding with a new coach and support team — was almost derailed with those stitches.
“I completely separated my face and I’m thinking, ‘What does this mean?’ We were on such a great path and it was a true question of like, ‘Do I really want this?’ ” he said Wednesday after shedding celebratory tears at the bottom of the Olympic halfpipe, just as he did after his first gold medal at the Turin Olympics in 2006. “Stepping out on snow again means that I’m willing to let that happen to myself again, and that’s a big decision. But I set out to do this goal, and I stuck to it and it helped me overcome that fear and then did the same trick that put me in the hospital to win the Olympics. What an emotional trip.”
White’s gold was the 100th gold medal for the U.S. in the history of the Winter Olympics and the fourth gold medal for the U.S. at the PyeongChang Games, all earned by snowboarders.
White spent the past four years focusing on one minute. And what a minute: At the
top of the Olympic halfpipe with the world watching, he was the final athlete, trailing the technical virtuoso Hirano after two runs. With ice in his veins, the 31-year-old stomped the run of his life — linking a pair of 14s for the first time in his career — to grab his third Olympic gold medal in four Olympic contests.
Oregon’s Ben Ferguson, snowboarding’s official protector of style, a role he inherited from Vermont’s Olympian Danny Davis, finished in fourth with a massive air-to-fakie into a whirlwind of stylized spinning highlighted by two impressive switch double corks.
“It is insane, the level to do those tricks. Those dudes are psychos. I have not even fathomed trying to do that,” Ferguson said. “If that’s the way it’s going, that’s kind of what you have to do to stay in there. But I will always try to keep a bit of pure freestyle snowboarding in there.”
Ferguson had deep praise for White, not only his physical prowess in the pipe, but his steely nerves.
“He can turn it on when he needs to and when it means something,” Ferguson said.
J.J. Thomas, White’s coach and the bronze medal winner from the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic halfpipe contest, said it “was the best pipe run I’ve ever seen in the history of the sport.”
White had never practiced those back-to-back 1440s. It’s so high consequence, it’s not something that a rider would repeat over and over in the pipe. The first time he ever tried it was on his second lap in the Olympics.
“It says without a doubt he is the best competitive snowboarder on earth hands down, and he surpasses that and even goes into the category of alltime greats in sports,” said Thomas, who heard the crowd roaring at the top of the pipe before the final run of the contest and saw White slamming his fist into his mittened palm.
“I felt it too. He needs this energy,” Thomas said. “He’s a world performer, and this is his stage.”