ASPEN – Shaun White wasn’t in the field at the Winter X Games last year – an absence that was hard to ignore when Danny Davis put on a stylin’ show for his first title at the world’s premier snowboarding contest.
No asterisk for Davis this time. But plenty more to wonder about for White.
The world’s most famous snowboarder skittered to a fourth-place finish Thursday night, opening the door for Davis to go back-to-back.
Like White, Davis hasn’t been riding that much this season. Unlike White, he didn’t look rusty, putting on a snowboarding show for the purists – lots of high-flying, leg-tweaking, technical riding that may not look as fancy on TV as all the flipping some riders do, but is certainly getting love from the judges.
“I haven’t been riding a ton of pipe this year,” Davis said. “I just had a ton of fun. I just felt I wanted to land runs, and that’s what I did.”
Taku Hiraoka of Japan added a second-place finish to go with his Olympic bronze. The Olympic champion, Iouri Podladtchikov, came in third – a remarkable finish considering he had surgery to repair his left ankle on Nov. 22.
White mentioned he’d tweaked his back in practice earlier this week, but his entire appearance here has been something of a mystery. Even his decision to compete wasn’t made official until a day before the contest.
He said the X Games always get his competitive juices flowing – he’s won eight times on the halfpipe in Aspen – and he needed a little something extra after nearly a year without a judged trip down the mountain. He gave virtually no hints about his physical readiness, so the default-mode guess was that if he was showing up for a contest, he must be ready to go.
His very first jump out of the halfpipe certainly looked like it. He went 19 feet, 3 inches over the side to open his first, clean qualifying run. But he didn’t look anywhere near that good again.
His last trip down the pipe, after two less-than-stellar rounds in the finals that had him in third place, only added to the mystery because it was so uneven.
On his first jump, he flew 19’10” feet over the pipe. Then, there were two straight unbalanced landings on 1080-degree jumps he usually does in his sleep. Then, despite traveling through the pipe at a snail’s pace, he executed a double-twisting, 1260-degree jump that most riders have trouble with at full speed. Amazing. But not enough. He gave a thumbs-up but his score of 62.66 wasn’t in the ballpark.
That left Davis as the only rider remaining, and when he strung together six straight jumps without a flaw, the repeat was a done deal. His score of 93.66 knocked Hiraoka and Podladtchikov down a notch and knocked White off the podium.
The eight-time champion left without stopping to talk.
