Olympic Silver: Not Good Enough for Shaun White?

Did Shaun White withdraw from the slopestyle event at the Sochi Olympics out of fear of a treacherous course, or for something less understandable—a desire to avoid the “shame” of coming in second?

If you judge by the popular press, it’s easy to blame the course. Earlier this week, Torstein Horgmo, a medal favorite from Norway, broke his collarbone in a practice run on Monday. An AP story gave a few details of the accident before declaring “Athletes had expressed concern about the steep jump,” which suggests the course was to blame.  USA Today, meanwhile, said that for White and others, “slopestyle injuries real concern.” The BBC suggested that snowboarders have been up in arms over the design. CBS raised the bar with a headline, “Shaun White calls for changes on ‘intimidating’ slopestyle course.” It warned, “Not many riders are pleased with the amount of risks Sochi’s course assumes.”  At a press conference cited by the Today show, White said “the potential risk of injury is a bit too much for me to gamble my other Olympics goals on.”

So if, for the sake of argument, the course is too dangerous, who’s to blame? The sports reader who knows that snowboarders and skiers haven’t always gotten along may blame the world ski federation (FIS), the organization in charge of Olympic skiing and snowboarding. Perhaps the no-nothings at FIS aren’t paying attention. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, mentions this angle.

Here’s a more likely scenario for the attention the course is getting: The “too risky” narrative is pure media gold. It fits into a longstanding tendency to exaggerate the risks of, well, anything, in the pursuit of ratings and readers. (“Temperatures to drop 10 degrees tonight! Details at 11!”) Snowboarding fits in very well with this narrative: Isn’t it the sport for fearless (or clueless) people who are one second away from paralysis?

White’s stated explanation is given some credibility–at least at first–by the fact that he’s already been injured. As ESPN.com told us recently, “Shaun White Suffers Jammed Wrist.” But the body of the story calls it a “minor injury,” so the headline, while accurate, is misleading.

Now it’s time to bring up another possibility: White’s move was a business (and perhaps ego-based) decision, above all else. An old-fashioned calculation of business interest certainly exists in other sports. Major League Baseball teams that fall out of contention ditch high-dollar players. For the most part, Tiger Woods plays only in golf’s majors, and in events that give him an appearance fee.  Why should snowboarders act apart from ego and financial considerations—especially a rider as wealthy and successful in business as White? Gerhard Gross, writing for Transworld Snowboarding, expresses it this way: “With winning such a part of Shaun’s image it could have made more sense for him step down rather than outright lose. His whole empire is based on the fact that he’s the best as what he does, after all.”

To gain the view of an insider, I talked with Ian Thorley, a professional snowboarder who has competed on the Dew Tour and the World Snowboard Tour. He was also in the pool to become a member of the Olympic team, but fell short.

Thorley cautioned against believing the media hype about the Sochi course. What about the idea that it’s so bad that athletes are complaining one after another? It’s normal for officials to make adjustments in response to feedback from the contestants, he told me. At any venue, “You go there, the first day [of practice] the jumps aren’t perfect, you tell them what changes need to be made, they fix them and the contest goes on.” Doesn’t Horgmo’s injury suggest that something is truly bad about Sochi? No; Thorley attributed it, as did the Norwegian himself, to bad timing and bad luck.

Could White’s wrist injury have been an important factor in his decision? I was puzzled: He has withdrawn from the slopestyle event but not the halfpipe one. If an injury is the key factor, wouldn’t he have withdrawn from both events? I asked Thorley for his opinion. “There’s no reason,” he said, why it would keep an athlete from one event but not another.

So did Shaun White, the most decorated snowboarder in the short history of the sport, withdraw because he didn’t want a silver medal? Thorley pulled no punches: “I don’t think that the general public should be fooled by Shaun’s comments. He didn’t pull out because he thinks the course is too risky.  He pulled out because he doesn’t see that he can win the event. In Shaun’s eyes, if he’s in second place, it’s a failure.”

When I asked Thorley if other high-level riders shared his views, he said “I would say 95 percent of the snowboarders out there are very, very upset with is actions.” From the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border, Sebastien Toutant made issued a Tweet saying, “It’s easy to find excuses to pull out of a contest when you think you can’t win.” Trash talking? Toutant’s a competitor, certainly. But what if he is telling the truth?

There are only four slots on the U.S. Olympic team. Some guy came in fifth in the competition to go to Sochi. He worked for months on end for the chance to be on the team. He lost to four other athletes, including one who, if Thorley and Toutant are right, decided that silver wasn’t good enough. That’s got to hurt. Unfortunately, with the U.S. entering the games one player short, it hurts the cause of competitive American snowboarding as well.