The men’s halfpipe final is tonight, and Shaun White—the snowboarder who is an “icon to teenage snow rats and widely recognized by grandmothers at the mall”—is expected to show off his new trick, the Double McTwist 1260. If he makes it, it’ll be difficult to imagine a scenario where he won’t win the gold. This is because White is the only person who can competitively perform it. The trick is one part athleticism, one part superpower, and a dash of idiotic blind faith. A more technical analysis reasons that White rotates himself three and a half times, while at the same time flipping himself around twice—resembling, if you blink quickly, a human propeller. White admits it’s the hardest trick he’s ever tried (though he isn’t the first), saying, “I don’t envy the guy that’s going to learn it after me, obviously.” (The New York Times has an awesome video library of snowboarding tricks, which I recommend to anyone who plans to watch the event tonight.)
White débuted the trick last month, twice—once at the Snowboarding Grand Prix in Park City, Utah, and again at the X Games in Aspen, Colorado, where he picked up gold medals from both. At a practice run in the X Games, he missed the landing of a double-cork 1080 (equally terrifying), and hit his head against the ice wall, losing his helmet:
“I cracked my head and my jaw pretty bad but I was trying to keep it tough for the X Games crowd,” he said. “But my very first thought was I have to get back up to the top and do it again, because you can build a weird self-conscious thing in your head if you don’t go back and do it again.”
Let’s hope White keeps his head in the game. Just as the death of the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili served as a costly reminder of the danger inherent in all winter sports, White is probably thinking of Kevin Pearce, the American snowboarder who sustained a critical brain injury and is currently at the University of Utah Hospital. Pearce—the only snowboarder who has matched White’s daredevilry—was training for the Olympics in Park City last month, when, after attempting a difficult trick, his board caught the lip of the halfpipe, and he was knocked unconscious after slamming his head into the ice. A recent report says that his doctors are “cautiously optimistic” but that the twenty-two year old has suffered from memory loss and impaired vision; perhaps most devastatingly, he will have to learn to walk again.
