Shaun White doesn’t look like a sports superstar. In fact, he doesn’t even look like someone who’d be interested in watching sports. Nevertheless, the Olympic gold medalist is the new face of winter sports success in America. Which is good, because few faces are more American than Shaun’s. Unbeatable in the halfpipe and unbelievable in the air, the kid known as the Flying Tomato has now set his sights on the ultimate snowboarder’s achievement—getting a date with Sasha Cohen. This is his story…

GROWING UP

Shaun White was born on September 3, 1986 to Cathy and Roger White in San Diego, California. (Click here for today's sports birthdays.) The Whites already had two kids, Jesse (seven) and Kari (one). The family lived up the coast from San Diego in Carlsbad.

The kids were swimming in a gene pool that featured great balance and a penchant for risk-taking. Roger was a dedicated surfer going back to the 1960s. And Cathy’s parents were both roller derby stars. Shaun started life on the edge, too. A heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot was causing un-oxygenated blood to be circulated throughout his body. It required two separate surgeries to correct.

Surfing and skateboarding go together in California, and Shaun, Jesse and Karidid a lot of both. In the winter, they also hit the ski slopes at Big Bear, which was a three- or four-hour drive away. Shaun was a little daredevil on skis—a menace to himself and anyone else who shared the slopes with him. Cathy thought he would get into less trouble snowboarding, so at age six she put him on a board and instructed him to copy everything Jesse did. By the end of Shaun’s first day he was doing jumps and going even faster than his big brother.

Kari also showed promise in this emerging sport. The family entered as many snowboarding meets as they could afford. Roger worked for the San Clemente Water Department and Cathy was a waitress, so they had to watch every nickel. At events, the family lived out of a 1964 Econoline van (nicknamed Big Mo), which usually looked out of place parked in the lot of the upscale resorts where the competitions were held.

The Whites were a go-with-the-flow family. The kids were encouraged to ask any question with the expectation of an honest answer. They were also allowed to explore and experiment in the world around them. The fact that Shaun, Jesse and Kari were so focused on board sports kept them from straying into trouble, and kept everyone very close. Still, it took a lot for Shaun’s parents to let him push the envelope. Having almost lost him as a baby, it was terrifying to watch him wipe out. Over the next few years he would break a hand and a foot, and fracture his skull.

At age seven, Shaun entered his first snowboarding contest and won. He was given a wild card berth in the national 12-and-under championships and finished 11th. A year later, Shaun was really starting to blossom as a competitor. He exploded into his jumps, rising five feet higher than the other kids, and using the extra air time to execute additional spins and twists. What truly elevated him above the other kids, however, was that underneath the cool demeanor beat the heart of a cut-throat competitor. Anyone who had played against him soccer, Monopoly, or any other game where you keep score knew he was not a boy to be trifled with.

Shaun’s name really started spinning around snowboarding circles when he was nine. Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk saw him on the slopes and began raving about him, predicting he would be the future of the sport. Soon people in snowboarding were calling him “Future Boy.”

Shaun was also moving up in the skateboarding world. A couple of years later, he was invited to participate in MTV’s Sports & Music Festival—where he collided with Bob Burnquist while skating doubles and broke his leg. He also joined the Tony Hawk Gigantic Skatepark Tour. Shaun had an advantage as a snowboarder, because he could work out landings for his sickest tricks on snow before bringing them to the skate park.

Of course, snowboarding was basically an outlaw sport when Shaun began to master it. The snowboarders were the people skiers screamed at and, in some cases, tried to legislate off the slopes. Shaun embraced this counterculture dynamic and used it to fuel his performance. By the age of 12, he was winning almost every important amateur meet he entered. The following year he turned pro.

By this time, snowboarding had become an Olympic event. The sport made its debut at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano. The winner of the first gold medal, Ross Rebagliati, subsequently failed his drug test—not for a performance-boosting steroid, but for second-hand marijuana smoke he had inhaled.

ON THE RISE

This was the sport’s image when Shaun began his ascent up the professional ranks. At first, it stunted snowboarding's development. There was a lot of partying, a lot of destructive (and self-destructive) behavior, and a screw-it attitude that scared off the corporate sponsors the sport would require to keep growing.

During Shaun’s first year as a pro, he logged a handful of Top Ten finishes, but basically he was known on the snowboarding tour as the “cute little kid.” In his second season, he placed second in several events, and suddenly he wasn’t so cute anymore. For Shaun, this actually felt good—he needed to be associated with the adult snowboarders in order to be taken seriously by potential sponsors. He also competed in his first X Games in 2000.

In 2001, at the age of 14, Shaun entered an event in Salt Lake City—ostensibly a dry run for the 2002 Olympics. He finished second in the half-pipe, fueling excitement in the snowboarding world about his chances at winning gold a year later. He kept the buzz going by having a great season.

Naturally, Shaun assumed that he would make his way to the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. He had beaten most of the top American snowboarders at one time or another, and thought he would do the same in Olympic qualifying. So did Sports Illustrated for Kids, which chose Shaun as its “cover boy” for the Winter Olympic Preview issue.

But the competition took Shaun by surprise. He missed making the team by an agonizing 0.3 points, and had to watch the Games on TV with the rest of the snowboarding world. When Americans like Danny Kass, Todd Richards and Ross Powers took home all the hardware, Shaun was not a happy camper.

Not surprisingly, Shaun tuned up his performance over the next year. He was named the best athlete at the 2003 X Games when he won the Slope Style and Super Pipe events. A month later he took the US Open Slope Style and Super Pipe events.

Shaun joined the pro skateboarding tour in 2002, and a year later he qualified for the Summer X Games in the sport, becoming the first summer-winter participant in X history. This vaulted Shaun to a new level of celebrity. He was the biggest crossover star in the extreme sports world, eclipsing one of his heroes, snowboarder and mountain biker Shaun Palmer, in the process.

At the 2004 Panasonic Open in Louisville, Shaun rolled to his first professional vert title. BMX superstar Dave Mirra saw Andy McDonald, Bucky Lasek and Burnquist after the competition and couldn’t resist giving them the needle. “Dudes,” he said, “you just got beat by a snowboarder!”

During the '04 X Games, Shaun suffered his first major injury when he tore the meniscus tissue in his knee. He had to endure six months of rehab just to get back on the slopes. It was during this time that he realized just how much he loved snowboarding.

With the Winter Olympics on the horizon, Shaun began to sense a subtle change in his sport. Snowboarders are not known for their dedication to training, but now many of the top competitors were starting to work out, curtail their after-hours activities, and even hit the weight room from time to time. Shaun got semi-serious, too. During the summer, he headed for New Zealand to take advantage of the winter weather and stay sharp.

MAKING HIS MARK

Heading into 2006, the media buzz around Shaun began to pick up. The press latched on to his Flying Tomato nickname, ironically just as he was beginning to tire of it. He started the new year off right, winning his sixth gold medal in the X Games.

When the Olympics began, Shaun was the acknowledged master of the 1080 (three complete 360s). These were the jumps that won events, although Shaun told anyone who would listen that he much preferred the longer, slower spinning jumps. His plan was to mix them up in combinations that would hopefully lead to a gold medal. He would be going up against some European snowboarders who had nailed 1260s and 1440s, but he wasn’t too worried about them. These were all or nothing jumps that Olympic audiences were unlikely to see.

The snowboarding events at the '06 Winter Games were held in Bardonecchia, two hours west of Turin. Between the Olympic village and the snowboarding site, Shaun encountered a lot of competitors who were taking the Olympics much too seriously for his tastes. He knew he had to respect the games, but he also had to find a way to be himself, and trading pins wasn’t doing it for him. He tried his best to have fun, responding to greeting of “buon giorno” by deadpanning “bon jovi.”

When asked what he hoped to accomplish in Turin, Shaun joked that he would like to date Sasha Cohen. He learned a quick lesson in keeping his mouth shut. Within hours, everyone he encountered—from Bob Costas to fellow US team members—asked him how his budding romance with Sasha was progressing.

Feeling completely out of his element at this point, Shaun hoped it would come together for him once competition started. As he began his first of two qualifying runs, however, he still didn’t feel quite right. He was a little nervous, a little tight, and he fell on one of his landings.

As Shaun prepared for his second run, he stood seventh, with only six spots open for the finals. Feeling relaxed as he headed down the mountain, with AC/DC screeching out of the PA system, he nailed it, grabbing 45.3 out of 50 points to secure a spot in the finals.

The finals belonged to Shaun. He executed six magnificent jumps, each one better than the next, in less than a minute. He wowed the crowd with a Frontside Air, then a McTwist, back-to-back 1080s, and finished off with a Backside 900. He was in the zone, getting his splash on, actually surfing the lip of the pipe. It was one of the best runs of Shaun’s life, and his score—46.8—was the highest in the entire competition. Shaun had won the gold. Teammate Danny Kass, the silver medalist in Salt Lake, captured silver again, and Markku Koski of Finland took the bronze.

At the medal ceremony, the grand nature of Shaun’s accomplishment finally started to register. As the national anthem played, two unmistakable trickles of tears ran down his cheeks.

When Shaun started to snowboard, the idea of participating in an Olympic competition seemed ridiculous. By the time he made his gold-medal run, snowboarding was, for many Americans at least, the highlight of the Olympics. And with Michelle Kwan’s injury, Cohen’s fall in the long program, the speed skaters squabbling and the implosion of Bode Miller, Shaun became the face of the U.S. team. And he knew it.

A couple of days after his triumph, Shaun was flying back to the U.S. on NBC’s private jet to get an early jump on the star-making process that he knew would soon begin. Fame has changed Shaun’s life and perspective, and has put some serious cash in his pockets. It has also raised the bar and heightened expectations for a kid who, by his own admission, is still trying to get the whole talking-to-chicks thing down.

Of course, that’s something Shaun no longer needs to worry about. Although he’ll probably be too busy to carry on anything like a normal relationship for the foreseeable future, there is one change in his life he’s happy to see: The chicks now come up and talk to him.

SHAUN THE SNOWBOARDER

Like most people in his sport, Shaun’s goal is not to do the most technical trick. When he rises off the snow, he tries to make his jump look easy, and to execute them to utter perfection. The aim, in a sense, is to master gravity.

The better Shaun is performing, the more relaxed he looks. And that is what separates him from others in his sport. When the pressure ratchets up in competition, he chills while other boarders tend to to tighten up.

To the untrained eye, these differences may not be apparent. What is obvious, though, is that Shaun gets more air under his tricks than anyone around.

© Copyright 2006 Black Book Partners, LLC. All rights reserved.