Trademark trick lifts White to Winter X Games gold
- Details
- Created on Monday, 31 January 2011 09:43
- Written by Brian Gomez
BY BRIAN GOMEZ, THE GAZETTE
ASPEN – Shaun White (above) was battling a cold that zapped his energy, reduced his amplitude and limited his speed. And he was in an awfully unfamiliar position – out of first place.
No problem for the world’s most dominant snowboarder. He reached into a never-ending bag of tricks and pulled the one nobody else could do, the one that couldn’t be topped.
The “Flying Tomato” atoned for an error-filled opening run with a second run capped by his signature move to beat Olympic teammates Scotty Lago and Louie Vito for his record fourth straight superpipe title Sunday at the Winter X Games on Buttermilk Mountain.
His score of 97.33, made possible by a double McTwist 1,260, a dizzying jump with two vertical flips inside 1 ½ horizontal flips that he mastered at a private, Red Bull-sponsored pipe near Silverton, matched the record mark he set last year in Aspen. It was more than enough to surpass the 92 posted by Lago in an impressive first run, and it gave White his 16th Winter X medal, including his 11th gold and his sixth gold in the pipe – all records.
“Sitting in second is not fun,” said White, who hadn’t competed since he won his second straight Olympic halfpipe title last February. “If I came out here, I had to earn my leather. Put something mean down. You can’t show up with this and not pull something cool.”
Sporting a flashy black leather jacket and tight black pants, White, 24, of Carlsbad, Calif., brought loads of style but not much height on a first run that left him three points behind Lago, the Olympic bronze medalist who performed back-to-back double cork 1,080s and a frontside 900 despite riding with a fractured jaw that was wired shut 2 ½ weeks ago.
On his second of three runs, after Lago didn’t improve on his score because of a wipeout, White literally put the game away, hitting 19 feet, 11 inches on a backside air, then going into a frontside double 1,080, a cab double 1,080 and a frontside 540. Most assumed the McTwist – with an array of spins and grabs that were held all the way through – would be White’s final maneuver, but he managed an extra stunt, a backside alley-oop rodeo.
“From watching Scotty’s run … I knew that the only way to top his score was to actually pull out all the stops and land my best trick,” White said. “I was a little nervous because I hadn’t really tried it. … There’s something about that trick, where I only have so many in me, so I knew that by only landing one, I had better odds of landing the next one.”
The silver his best finish at Winter X, Lago dubbed his opening trip into the 22-foot pipe “one of the better runs I’ve ever put down. I think it was better than the run I put down at the Olympics. … I obviously knew Shaun was going to throw down. It’s Shaun White.”
“It’s tough to say what (White) did to win and what we didn’t do,” said Vito, who hadn’t claimed a Winter X medal before this bronze. “He was the only one of the night to throw the double McTwist 1,260, and sometimes, that pays off. He definitely deserved it.”
White admitted he was motived by not qualifying Friday in slopestyle, an event in which he has won a record five golds on Buttermilk. “I’m proud to show up and take a beating in slopestyle,” he said, “and then come here and grab the four-peat. … It takes so much for me nowadays to get fired up about something. All I want to do is go hit jumps now.”
Weather
Current Contests
