New West at the X Games

Aspen X Games: White Doesn’t Win, For Once

By Richard Martin, 1-27-07

	You're still a rock star, dude

With four riders left to go in the men’s snowboard “slopestyle” final, Shaun White stood in an unaccustomed spot: third place.

On his first run White, looking he was out for a practice run, didn’t do any thing spectacular and wobbled a bit on his final 1080 , scoring below 90 in his first slopestyle run at the X Games in the last 5 years. Andreas Wiig, , Norway , a precise Norwegian, had put together a clinical run for the lead, pleasing the judges but not the crowd of several thousand who’d come out to see their hero demonstrate his dominance again. White had one run to reassert his place as the supreme snowboarder of the era.

Endlessly flashing on the big screens the Rolling Stone cover that followed White’s transcendent performance at the Olympics, in Turin, last year, the announcers at Buttermilk kept calling White a rock star. The Michael Jordan comparison is at least as apt: like Jordan, White—with his Beatlesesque wit with the press, his flaming mane of scarlet hair, and his crossover marketing flair—is not only the best athlete in his sport but a celebrity who is taking the sport to unprecedented heights.

He also looks like easily the best athlete on the course, even when he’s not winning. Though only five-eight, White carries himself like a six-footer. Now 20, he’s been winning at the X Games since he was 16. He has a grace that you can’t teach or learn: While other riders strain to make the three-spin 1080s, White barely seems to exert himself.

“His effortless style is what makes him so appealing,” wrote Rolling Stone writer Gavin Edwards. “On the halfpipe, he looks like a relaxed weekend rider who somehow stumbled into doing one astonishing trick after another.”

White is our first slacker superstar; the signs at the base saying “Shaun White will you marry me?” don’t even begin to capture his appeal for Madison Avenue, which for years has been searching, usually ineptly, for a way to reach the new generation of computer-bred kids who couldn’t care less about traditional forms of broadcasting or advertising and who usually have their iPod earbuds blasting too loudly to hear anyway.

White’s best event is not the slopestyle, in which riders navigate a series of terrain-park features and jumps, being scored for freestyle maneuvers, amplitude, “difficulty of line,” and clean landings. White’s genius is for the superpipe, where his astonishing ability to launch himself into the air sets him apart. “He can do tricks five feet higher than everyone else does them,” said skateboard legend Tony Hawk, to whom White is often compared, in the RS article.

On his final slopestyle run White attacked the course with more vigor, but on the final jump he struggled to finish his third spin and brushed his butt on the snow as he landed. He remained in third, his string of four slopestyle victories at the X Games stopped. The sound from the stunned crowd was like air escaping a balloon. Typically, White didn’t act disappointed; he mugged for the crowd and congratulated Wiig, the winner. Rock stars don’t cry when they lose.

And anyway, the superpipe final is tomorrow night.

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