Heavily tattooed, recovering alcoholic and former frontman for a Los Angeles punk rock band, snowboarder Shaun Palmer hardly fits the idyllic mold of an Olympic athlete. At age 37, he seems more suited to an era gone by, a representative of snowboarding’s limit-breaking rebellious roots, when riders took as much pride in antagonizing the staid skiing world as they did in dragging their knuckles down a makeshift halfpipe.
Yet with only six weeks remaining before the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin, “The Palm” once again finds himself in the mix. Not in a bar fight, but for a possible spot on the U.S. Olympic Snowboard Team as a competitor in the new Olympic discipline of snowboardcross.
“Palmer is still alive,” U.S. Snowboard Team head coach Peter Foley said Friday. “We earned another quota spot on the World Cup tour that we’re using for qualifying in January, and (the coaches) decided that because he’s got the speed and he’s shown that he can do it in the past that we’ll give him another shot at it. He’s got two more chances to get it done.”
Foley’s choice of words to describe snowboarding’s original bad boy alludes to much more than Olympic qualifying. Last Memorial Day weekend, Palmer made national headlines after drinking and drugging himself into a near-fatal coma that required a helicopter ride to a Reno, Nev., hospital from his hometown of South Lake Tahoe, Nev. That event reportedly served as the catalyst for change, with the Olympic ideal serving as the model.
“Shaun has always had a dream of going to the Olympics,” longtime friend and agent Bob Klein said. “He was the world champion in halfpipe in ’89 and ’90, but that was a long time before snowboarding became an Olympic sport. Now he feels like he’s got another shot with boardercross.”
Palmer declined to be interviewed for this story.
In the sport of boardercross, Palmer always has a shot. According to another longtime friend, extreme skier Glen Plake, he and Palmer “invented the sport” as kids on Plake’s backyard motocross track, racing the banked turns and jumps on snowy days before the nearby ski slopes were open.
The sport has advanced significantly since then, earning status in the Winter X Games in the 1990s, FIS World Cup a few years later and this season, the Winter Olympics, where four riders will line up at the top of the course and battle their way down an obstacle-riddled mountain course to the finish line.
An ace in the “hole”
The style of racing particularly suits Palmer, who won the first of his five snowboarding world championships in 1985, then became a millionaire off his ability to grab the “hole shot” out of the start and hang onto the lead not just on a snowboard, but on skis, mountain bikes and motorcycles.
Over the years, Palmer has earned five X Games gold medals in various incarnations of “cross” competition, and in 1996 (his first season) he won the world championship in similarly styled dual slalom mountain bike racing. He missed winning the overall downhill world championship that season by .15 of a second.
Palmer, who also heads a successful snowboard company of the same name, would go on to be named the ESPN action sports athlete of the year in 2001, around the same time he last qualified for a medal round in snowboardcross competition.
World Cup results crucial
In the comeback attempt that officially got underway at the Dec. 8 World Cup race in Whistler, British Columbia, Palmer regained some of his old form during the qualifying time trial, where he ranked second. But crashes in subsequent head-to- head rounds left him out of medal contention as teammates Nate Holland and reigning world champion Seth Wescott earned podium spots on successive days.
Foley attributed the crashes to riding boards too short for the demands of the course.
“The snow got real hard and bumpy, and there was just no way to handle the speed he was carrying,” Foley said. “Palmer has clearly shown that he has the speed. And he has a history of winning major snowboardcross races, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see him qualify for the Olympic team. There is just a lot of depth on the World Cup right now. That’s his biggest stumbling block, not his skills.”
In order to qualify for one of four potential positions on the U.S. team, Palmer must finish among the top four overall in one of three remaining World Cup races (Jan. 4-5 in Austria and Jan. 15 in Italy) and be among the top U.S. point-winners on the World Cup circuit. But, given the results of Holland and Wescott, as well as strong showings from Jayson Hale (fourth place at Whistler and third at worlds last year), Graham Watanabe (winner of last week’s U.S. championship race) and Jason Smith of Basalt (second place at U.S. championships), Palmer clearly has his work cut out.
And then, of course, there is the age factor. As Foley – who competed against Palmer long before turning to coaching in 1994 – notes, snowboardcross is still new enough as a sport that the paradigm has yet to be established as to how old is too old to remain competitive.
“It takes a lot of strength. You have to kill it all day long for sure to make it all the way to the finals,” Foley said. “So far in snowboardcross, Lindsey (Jacobellis), Nate (Holland), Seth (Wescott) and now (Jason) Hale all have top-fours on the World Cup.
“Otherwise it’s real wide open. As far as Palmer is concerned, I definitely wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen.”
Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
