Olympic Surprises

Shaun White is a longtime hero of the sport, good enough and hip enough to have achieved celebrity status. He began competing in the X Games in 2000 at the age of 13 and won his first X Games medal, a silver, in 2002. Year after year, he kept competing and consistently medaling at the X Games. He won or medaled at a long string of national and international competitions. At his first two Olympics, in Turin in 2006 and Vancouver in 2010, he took the gold.

By 2014, White appeared to have passed his snowboarding peak. He and some childhood friends formed a band in 2012—Bad Things, in which White was lead guitarist—and so he apparently didn’t keep up with his snowboard practicing. At the 2014 Olympics in Sochi he finished fourth. He appeared at fewer U.S. and international competitions and even sat out the X Games after what he called a “lover’s quarrel” with the organizers. Before he turned 30 in 2016, he had launched an annual sports and music festival in California and a menswear line. No one would have been surprised if he had decided to leave competitive snowboarding and not come back.

Yet back he came. By early 2017, he returned to the X Games—but came in 11th out of 12 competitors, his worst halfpipe performance since his first. Still, he was already talking about preparing for the 2018 Olympics. By last October, White was training his hardest in New Zealand. But he crashed, face first, atop the halfpipe. In video of the accident, White’s body flops for a terrifying moment like a ragdoll. His forehead was gashed, his nose was crunched, his lip was busted open, his lungs were bruised. Blood spattered the snow. White needed 62 stitches.

Such a blow could have wrecked White’s confidence. But after a few weeks of recuperation he was training again. And in January, he qualified to compete at this year’s Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

After a strong start at the Olympics, White fell behind by a few points. In the second round, he stumbled. Then came the third, his last run with one man to beat, Ayumu Hirano of Japan, who led White with a 95.25, a score just shy of perfect.

I marvel at the way these races work. Players wait at the top before they go, and once they take off, there’s no holding back. So White waited, face forward and snowboard not yet clamped, for more than a minute and 30 seconds, which must have felt like an hour with all the pressure. And then—boom—once you start, your run will be over before you know it. White’s final run lasted just 33 seconds from start to stop.

White could have repeated his earlier run and hoped for a higher score executing the same pattern. Instead, he went for something he had never accomplished: a combination of a frontside double-cork 1440 and a cab double-cork 1440. That is to say, White twice in a row flew up off the halfpipe and spun in the air four times while also twice tilting upside-down. To do a single double-cork 1440 is an incredible feat; White had never before done two, even in practice. (In fact, it was while practicing a 1440 in New Zealand that White had smashed his face.) After he nailed the 1440 combination and some other slick moves, White began to celebrate. When his final score—97.75—was announced, he cried. “There were a lot of obstacles to overcome and now it’s all worth it,” he said.

White is by no means perfect. He recently settled a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a woman, Lena Zawaideh, who played drums in his band. After his victory in South Korea, he spoke insensitively about the suit—he called it “gossip”—and simply tried to make the topic go away. He later apologized for that and described himself as a “changed person.” That’s true on the snow; for the rest, time will tell.

Some people think inexperience in sports is costly. I’m not convinced. In some cases, inexperience—and the passion it creates—can be ideal. Just look at the phenomenal beginning by sudden-star Chloe Kim, born in California to Korean immigrants. She’s 17 years old, with a broad smile and a snowboard she has mastered since she first hit the slopes at 4. She can speak French, Korean, and English and always seems confident. In the women’s division of the halfpipe competition, she’s already better than everyone.

Unlike White, Kim had no worries or doubts about her finish. She was so good on her first attempt that she ended up with a 93.75, higher than everyone else. Relaxed and happy, she went for more, like any champion would, and she succeeded in remarkable fashion. As the crowd watched and cheered, Kim leaped back-to-back 1080s (three revolutions in the air). She landed with ease and immediately hugged Arielle Gold, the American who came in third, and Liu Jiayu, the Chinese woman who won silver. Then came the score: 98.25. She was all but perfect.

Now’s the time, at age 17, to talk about random things in life—which, in Kim’s case, means talking about her favorite food (churro ice cream sandwiches). Few viewers of the Olympics know anything about her and her parents, who stood together and watched their daughter from afar. Kim looks as casual and confident as possible—something not uncommon in sports, especially when the person is young and has nothing to lose. That will change for her, probably the next time around. Those Olympics will be tougher, as the athletes behind her will work even harder to catch up. She’ll feel pressure and maybe even some fear. But all that is still years off; for now, there’s no young American Olympic athlete with more grace and energy.

“The one thing I learned is to give everything a shot,” Kim said. “No regrets is the best way to go.”

No regrets: Mikaela Shiffrin, the best women’s skier in the world, knows this. She also knows how hard it is to keep that attitude. Before the Olympics began, Shiffrin was seen as a woman who could win four gold medals in skiing events, a remarkable feat that would break the record of three. At age 22, she looked in the prime of her career and won her first event with a stellar second run. But one fine race was no guarantee about the rest. The next day was supposed to be easy, in her best event, the slalom, where competitors quickly go back and forth as they race to the bottom. But everything went wrong.

This is where we all have to remember the reality about skiing. It’s an intense sport, one in which a single mistake can, at best, slow you down or, at worst, send you crashing off the course. It’s not like a marathon or a track race, in which falling, crashing, and false starts are rare. Shiffrin has made the conventional wisdom about skiing look false over the years by dominating everywhere she competed. She even won an Olympic gold medal in the slalom at Sochi when she was just 18, and she was the favorite to win again in Pyeongchang. How much the favorite? Betting establishments were giving her an 80 percent chance of winning, an absurdly high number for such a wild and unpredictable sport.

So what happened? First, she threw up, because of nerves, not a stomach bug. She had done that before, but this time didn’t recover. She skied conservatively, as if something less than her best could be enough. That could have been true; defensive technique can sometimes work for someone so talented. This was not one of those times.

“Coming here and skiing the way I did, really conservative, was a huge disappointment,” Shiffrin said. “Sometimes I feel the only one who can beat myself in slalom is me. I beat myself in the wrong way today. It’s a really big bummer.”

When Shiffrin was younger, little was asked of her, like Kim today. This time, there were outrageous expectations—thanks in part to commercials featuring her and footage of her childhood broadcast on television showing her already looking like a star in waiting. As much as Shiffrin has trained to lose her fear, she had never been in an event like this year’s Olympics, with so much more on the line than four years ago. Shiffrin would have more chances for gold in tougher events for her and success there—after this piece was written—may have salvaged the games for her. No matter what, though, she won’t forget about this one race and the fact that she has to wait another four years to accomplish what she—and everyone else—had planned for so long.

One of the competitions Shiffrin had to sit out because of the packed Olympics schedule was the super giant slalom race—the “super-G.” That race was won this year by Ester Ledecka of the Czech Republic. Ledecka is best known as a snowboarder, and although she was going to make history as the first Olympian to compete in both snowboarding and skiing, no one expected her super-G performance to be especially noteworthy. For her to receive a medal at all is an upset; for her to take the gold came as a shock, even to her. The picture of her standing in her skis in disbelieving silence, mouth open, expecting a correction to the scoreboard that showed her a winner, will likely be one of the enduring images of this year’s Olympics—and is a helpful reminder that no matter our experience and expectations, there is always room for surprises in sports.

Tom Perrotta writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, and other publications.