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and back, which are kind of like hitting lefty if your right-handed. I remember putting those all together into one run and it was like, ‘Wow we can’t believe he put all that in one run’, but those had all been done before. “Really, I was just very good at taking all those tricks and mastering them, putting my own stamp on them sure, but they had been done. My talent I guess was being able to nail them, put them together in a run and land them all the time and not make mistakes.” In Silverton, for the first time White would go further, attempting to push not just his boundaries, but those of the sport. “I remember attempting these tricks and the first ones were just hideous! I had it in my mind that I would do a full flip and then rotate this way or that and then add something else and I was just completely wrong. It was just awful. “So I had to completely redo all the rotations and figure out how they worked. I had a wish list in my mind of the kind of tricks I wanted to do, just wondering what if? What if I kept flipping, what if I added another element. And then you start thinking, well, is there a way to land it? “That was the luxury of the foam pit, because you would never try it otherwise, you would just beyond hurt yourself.” After the high tech of the pit build, the crucial element ended up being the lowest tech of all – a thin line of plastic tape stretched across the middle of the foam. “If I was on the other side I was in. But then the question was ‘how far in?’ 62
“I had a wish list in my mind of the kind of tricks I wanted to do, just wondered what if?” because you don’t want to go too far, that’s dangerous. But with this I could know every time if I was in that ‘money’ zone.” The money shots arrived quicker than expected, despite the fear of taking the tricks out of the relative comfort zone of the pit and onto the half-pipe for real. “Man, I was terrified,” he admits. “It could have been all over. All it would have taken was for me to throw the trick and panic halfway through it. I would have severely hurt myself. I know from past experience of learning tricks that you have to commit yourself totally or it will be bad. The first one I went for it was ‘flip, flip’ and I hit my butt and I was so relieved, just sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, man, it worked, I got out of it unscathed.’ That gave me so much confidence. I knew it was going to work. It just snowballed after that – a trick a day.” White stands up now, demonstrating the rotations, rattling out the names of the new moves and then pauses, frowning slightly. “You know, this is definitely the first time I’ve taken the initiative to learn something totally new and it feels great. Forever, I’ll be the first one to do these tricks. “I can’t describe how it felt the first time I landed the front-side double-cork 1080,” he says. “I’d done it, I’d invented a new trick and I was sitting there just
shaking. I knew right then it was something special. I was so excited.” So much so that the debut of a couple couldn’t wait. In August, White took his new creations to the New Zealand Open, blitzing the finals with revolutionary back-to-back double-cork 1080s and stringing together a run described by the event organisers as some of “best and most progressive riding ever witnessed”. On the cusp of another tilt at Olympic gold, it’s exactly where White wants to be. “I really had to psych myself up to attempt these things. I’d hold my breath and try it, but now it’s just something that just feels part of my run. I think that maybe that’s the difference between me and other guys. I don’t just want to do the trick; I want to have it as mine. I don’t feel comfortable just saying I can do the trick, I want to own it. Having that going to the Olympics is a great feeling.” White went to his first Olympics as a nascent star and emerged a commodity, traded into something possibly greater than the sport he arguably now defines. With that comes the pressure to repeat the feat. The secrecy surrounding his Silverton experiments has only served to balloon that expectation. He, though, is unmoved by the weight of expectation. “If there’s an increase in pressure now, it’s fine,” he insists. “To be honest, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in that same position. I don’t ever remember being at a competition and not being one of the guys to beat, so I don’t feel that there’s more of a burden now. It’s good for me to feel that too, always feeling that I’m a threat to the competition and if not the guy, then one of the guys to watch out for.” In the end, what White was doing was returning to the core of who he is as a sportsman, and that has given him a platform he never thought possible. “So many people do this and lose sight of what it was that put them in that position,” he insists. “I don’t think I’m the kind of the person to take my eye off the ball, the real prize. It is such a beautiful thing to go back to that. I’m a snowboarder, that’s what I do. It was fantastic that the original thing that brought me here was what underwent the most dramatic change. Because I’m good at this sport. I do this on a level that very few other people can do it at. “Now I sit back and think: ‘Hmmm, y’know, if I had that foam pit again… knowing what I know now, then this what I’d really like to do...’” =fi dfi\ XYflk J_Xle N_`k\# jc`[\ fm\i kf nnn%j_Xlen_`k\%Zfd