Article by Barry Rodgers
American snowboarding icon, Shaun White did it again on Wednesday 17th February. He won his second Olympic Gold Medal for the Men’s Halfpipe competition. This may have been buried beneath the fact that this was America’s best ever Winter Olympics day for medals. Except that White did it with total style which cements his position as one of the coolest atheletes on the planet.
Having the Gold medal in the bag after two of his three runs, he decided to have ‘a bit of fun’ on the final run.
He performed, and that is really the best word for it, a snowboarding trick which he invented and only he can do. It is called the Double McTwist 1260, which is a gravity defying off-axis spin that incorporates two forward rolls. Take a look at the video to see what it involves. He developed this trick at an Olympic sized halfpipe built especially for him at a remote location in Colorado by sponsors Red Bull.
So who is this man with the shock of red hair some are calling the David Beckham (or fellow snowboarder Scott Lago calls the Mike Jordan of…) of snowboarding? Who is the coolest dude in the coolest sport?
White started snowboarding at age 8 travelling to competitions with his family, staying in Motel 6s and cooking in the room to save money.
Times have certainly changed. Conservative estimates predict his 2010 income to top m. He has a video game which has sold over 3 million copies, and sponsorship deals with Amex, hewlett Packard and Red bull. He has designed goggles and sunglasses with Oakley and has a designer range of streetwear with Target and another called The White Collection.
He insists that it hasn’t altered him:
“I go out there and take falls and learn these tricks. This is what I’m good at. This is what I do. If I’ve been doing photo shoots and meetings and product design and all this stuff, yeah, it’s really cool but it’s not what I originally started doing.
“I’m pretty sure I would have been corrupted a long, long time ago by the money. If I was going to do it, if I was going to go down that path and turn into some other guy, I definitely think it would have happened already. I’m glad that money hasn’t changed me, and I’m glad that my family is still the same people. I go home and I have to, you know, clean up after the dog.”
His Olympic team-mates may disagree. He has rented separate accommodation from the rest of the team and is absent during the parties that this sport is famous for. This, in fairness, could be to do with the fact that he is now publicly recognised a lot, especially around high-profile events.
But just like groundsmen remember the young David Beckham still practising free kicks as it got dark at the training ground, hours after the rest of the team and coaches had gone home, then Shaun White can be seen at dusk at skateboard parks and snowboard runs, working in a focussed solitary way at being the best snowboarder on the planet
Now he has to balance big business with maintaining respect within the ubercool snowboarding community
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You can see a video of shaun performing his McTwist here: Shaun White Snowboarding Legend
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