WHITE’S MEDAL RUN SLIP SLIDES AWAY
Halfpipe final hints at a changing of the guard
Gods fall. Gods get old, and younger gods come to take their place. Snowboarding is for the young, and some young gods of snowboard call their tricks YOLO and yell “YOLOOOOO” as they leave their gold medal news conference with the long, wild flying hair of a Musketeer.
Shaun White is just 27, but his face looks more weathered now, under his businesslike semi-pompadour haircut, still a vibrant red. On Tuesday at the Sochi Olympics, on a mushed-up mountain halfpipe that glowed under lowhanging ethereal clouds, White did not win for the first time in three Olympics. Incredibly, the American finished fourth. In sports, without exception, gods fall.
Iouri Podladtchikov, a longhaired fearless Russian kid whose family immigrated to Switzerland as a boy, is just two years younger than White, but he feels younger because everything was new to him. After his finals run, he screamed and jumped onto the padded bench where riders rest, snapped his boots out of his board, and threw his board away as he charged towards the ecstatic crowd. He dropped to his knees and lay down his head and squeezed the snow between his fingers. He hurled his goggles into the night. He hadn’t even won yet. White, and the Japanese riders, were still at the top of the mountain.
But his score held. White rushed past the assembled press in the mixed zone 20 minutes later, a smile coating his face, claiming he was being forced to go to anti-doping, which can be done an hour after the event. He arrived at the media centre more than an hour later, and was asked, at age 27, about his legacy.
“For me to be remembered in the sport, I don’t think tonight makes or breaks my career,” said White, who had a record 13 gold medals at the X Games, along with three silvers and two bronze. “I tried to win. I went for it. I went for big tricks that only Iouri and myself are doing ... I wanted to win. It just wasn’t my night. Which is really tough to say. I mean, it’s a big night.”
The terrain was a mess; riders had been calling the pipe a joke or garbage or crap all week, and accusing the IOC of being cheap. But Podladtchikov was brilliant, carding a 94.75, and the two Japanese riders sat second and third. And White stood looking down at the course — a halfpipe is so much steeper in person — with a chance to beat everyone again. He had hopped a fence to make two Make-A-Wish kids smile earlier in the day. He’s used to being the hero.
And he slipped once, catching the lip of the pipe with his board. And he skidded once, and he touched the snow with his hand on his last landing after hanging in the air for so, so long.
And that was the night that Shaun White lost in the Olympics. Podladtchikov is a delight, bursting with energy. He talked about how Shaun stole his YOLO trick, named after the You Only Live Once acronym the kids are using nowadays, and did it better. And it bummed him out that White was doing it better, but hey, who did it better today? He talked about how he and Shaun could feel special, because “we’re at that level of the sport that we’re doing things that nobody else is doing.”
Podladtchikov carried on merrily, feeling so fresh. Snowboarding is for the young, and Shaun White can still be the best. He had the top scores in qualifying. He can still rule.
But on this night, he was the oldest man in the 12-man final, and one of the oldest men in the field. And when White arrived to talk he was subdued, as befitted the strange occasion. He talked ruefully about missing the Olympics when he was 15 by three-tenths of a point, and how this didn’t feel as bad as that, and he praised Ayumu Hirano, the 15-year-old Japanese rider who won silver. Told Hirano was 15 years and 74 days old, White cracked, “he’s gonna retire soon.”
And he gave credit to Podladtchikov, saying it was nice to see someone pushing the envelope of what’s possible. It was only one night, on crap snow, after so much glory. But it must have felt, just a little, like being replaced.