VAIL — Shaun White wears a lot of hats. He’s a musician. A pro skateboarder. An event owner. A businessman.
And while he hasn’t donned it in a couple years, Saturday he burnished his longtime crown as the best halfpipe snowboarder ever, earning his 10th title in the 34th annual Burton U.S. Open with a dominant performance that dashed any notion the 29-year-old’s snowboarding career was on the wane.
After an almost two-year break from competitive riding that followed a , White’s explosive, flawless runs in the Vail halfpipe showed he is not about to relinquish his halfpipe throne even as he expands his role from athlete to leader in the sport he had dominated for half his life.
“A lot of people thought I was retiring, which is not something I thought,” he said Saturday after posting the three highest scores in a row, boosting the largest airs and most technical tricks of the contest. “Honestly, I feel like I’m just getting started.”
White’s return to the halfpipe this season hit a bump before the snow even started falling. The trouble began with a simple question asked in a that eventually led to him missing snowboarding’s marquee Winter X Games. A moderator wanted the world’s most recognized snowboarder to share why he launched his rebranded Air + Style snowboarding festival.
White said his 2014 purchase of the 20-year-old snowboarding tour started in a meeting with ESPN in 2012, when he was helping the network expand its wildly successful X Games franchise beyond Austin, Aspen and France into Spain, Germany and Brazil.
“I gave them my ideas, which were Air and Style basically. Like, dude, we could do this huge sports music festival and we could do all these things that would make it unique and different. And they decided to just go and do their own thing,” White said.
The network staged three new X Games in 2012 and , saying “the overall economics of these events do not provide a sustainable future path.”
“When they decided not to continue on, that’s when I bought Air and Style,” said White, saying he was confused when ESPN took offense at his comments. “It wasn’t like I was bad mouthing. I just said what was happening.”
White said ESPN executives called his agent and said his comments were the reason he was not welcome at the 2016 Winter X Games in Aspen, .
It’s not a big deal, said White, lounging in shorts and a gray hoodie at a Ritz-Carlton suite in Vail last week, a day before he aced halfpipe qualifiers in the Burton U.S. Open.
“To be honest, I’ve got my hands full,” he said.
Indeed. White is in transition. He has dropped his longtime coach, Bud Keane, who remains a close friend. With his freakish talent on a board still unrivaled, he is aiming to compete in both halfpipe and slopestyle at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, which would be his fourth Olympiad. Still, he is moving beyond a singular mission to win medals.
Next season he will expand his Air + Style snowboarding big air and music festival beyond Los Angeles, Innsbruck and Beijing to include both halfpipe and slopestyle events at Genting Resort Secret Garden in China — a venue for the 2022 Winter Olympics — as well as at Laax, Switzerland, and at his home hill of Mammoth Mountain. While the world wondered where White was during this year’s X Games in Aspen, he announced he had acquired a portion of Mammoth, where he is now planning events bolstering the Southern California resort complex’s status as a snowboarding mecca.
White has big plans for Mammoth, with a series of concerts, contests and possibly tying the Mammoth resorts into Southern California’s school systems, offering busing between school and hill for league competition. He is developing Air + Style training camps at Mammoth, where beginners and pros alike could train in a year-round facility.
But as White shifts into a broader role in the sport he has monopolized since 2003, he is hardly relinquishing his never-ending quest to climb podiums. After taking a season off following the 2014 Olympics, he stormed back into the pipe with a decisive win at the Breckenridge Dew Tour in December. He was hoping to compete at the Laax Open in Switzerland the next month, but left soon after arriving when he received word that a good friend had died. Then he lost his invitation to the X Games and spent most of February working his two-day Air + Style festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum, an event that featured 23 live bands and served as a tour final for the global Air + Style series.
When he arrived in Vail last week, he hadn’t ridden for six weeks.
It didn’t show in the halfpipe. Fresh off the couch, White spun back-to-back, double-cork 1080s to ace the halfpipe semifinals, landing high on the wall and sticking each landing. Saturday in the finals, he soared above the 25-foot height meter, boosting a trio of double-corked 1260s no other rider could match.
But White’s first return to slopestyle since 2014 — after — did not go well. White, the oldest competitor among 31 slopestyle riders Friday, fell on the very first rail in both of his runs, finishing last. That’s painful for a rabidly competitive rider.
“I don’t want to ever look at that again,” White said Friday. “It’s been a while since I’ve been on the slopestyle course, and I know where I need to focus right now.”
White’s $45,000 performance Saturday shows that his notorious obsession with winning hasn’t ebbed, even as he elevates his leadership role in the evolution of his sport with his plans for Air + Style and Mammoth Mountain.
“Someone had to step up and take air and style on, and it’s pretty rad that it’s a snowboarder,” said style master Danny Davis, a popular rider
At 27, Davis, like White, is on the tail end of his halfpipe career. And like White, Davis is developing events that match his vision for snowboarding. His four-year-old Peace Park draws the biggest names in snowboarding with a park-pipe hybrid course of creative features in Wyoming. His five-year-old Frendly Gathering in Vermont has grown into a popular, grassroots music festival.
The idea behind Peace Park follows Davis’ wish that every competitive venue should be different, sparking rider creativity.
“I think what Shaun is trying to do is very similar in a sense that he’s trying to gain control of snowboarding because right now it’s a federation of skiers who govern snowboarding,” Davis said. “We are just creating more. It’s cool to clash two worlds together. We find the things we love — like snowboarding and music — and we try to put them together. We get inspired. Shaun is an amazing shredder, and the fact that he has the will to go make a contest series says the dude is a true snowboarder and he’s working for the better of snowboarding.”
Snowboarding is evolving with new events and another Olympics on the horizon, White said.
“There’s a lot of change I’m hoping will come soon and I hope to be a part of that,” he said. “I know I got a little bit of flack for it when I was younger that I didn’t have more of a voice in the sport. But, man, I was like 20, like everyone else, and I was just trying to have a good time. This is a lot more responsibility.
“I don’t think I could have done it back then. I’m so glad I didn’t try to stand up and have a voice at the point because I didn’t know what my stance was and I didn’t agree with a lot of things … that was going through at the time. I’m happy to have this role now. It’s really exciting, and I feel like I’m old enough now to actually know what I want to do and how to get there and hopefully make the right decisions.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins
