“I got to see him win that gold medal and then a few other times, and he became my rival,” James, 27, said. “It’s a funny evolution from him being someone I looked up to, to then being someone I had to try to show up and beat.”
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As White flashed back to his start at age 7, and wondered aloud how he might pay it all forward when he retires from Olympic-level competition, he held his snowboard tight, logo out.
He recently started his own company, called Whitespace, with his brother, though it is unclear just what Whitespace will be. Maybe a company like Burton, selling snowboards (White now rides a Whitespace-branded board) and clothes and such.
But it sounded like White was not going to disappear.
“Just because I’m not competing doesn’t mean I won’t be here at the next Olympics, cheering on all my friends and being a big part of the sport,” he said.
He pulled himself back into the present, back and forth as smoothly as he rides the transition zone between hits in the halfpipe. Minutes before, he had put down another in a line of clutch performances.
He stumbled on the first run, under-rotating a double McTwist 1260, a trick he invented and that has been a part of his Olympic run since 2010. He killed time waiting for his next turn — maybe his last Olympic turn — going up the lifts, riding, thinking.
What if he flubbed the run again? Family was watching at home, worried this was how it would end. Reporters were gathered at the halfpipe, wondering if a fall on a trick he invented would be the sad coda to the sport’s best career.