BEIJING, China — Over the last 16 years, Shaun White has established himself as a legendary Winter Olympian - synonymous with the sport of snowboarding in much the same way that Tony Hawk is with skateboarding.
It's not as prominent a part of his profile anymore, but White was once as much a star skateboarder as a snowboarder. He was even mentored by Hawk.
Thursday night will mark the final ride for White on snow at an Olympics. He has announced he is retiring following his last run in Beijing, in the men's halfpipe final.
Shaun White Olympics basics
- Event: Men's snowboarding halfpipe final, Thursday, Feb. 10; first run begins at 8:30 p.m. ET (9:30 a.m. Friday morning in Beijing), third and final run begins at 9:25 p.m. ET (10:25 a.m. Friday morning in Beijing).
- Where he stands: White qualified for the final with the fourth-highest score, but the qualifying scores are thrown out for the final, where the best score of three runs will decide who wins gold.
- How to watch: It will air in primetime on 11Alive and can be streamed via NBC Olympics here.
White was both a skateboarder and snowboarder from an early age and he said previously that he feels his snowboarding helped him to become a champion in skateboarding as well.
"I feel like my snowboarding helps my skateboarding because of the size of things. I am doing such big airs in the half-pipe snowboarding and then I get on the vert ramp, it doesn’t seem big to me. It’s not as intimidating. So a lot of the points and scores I get from the judges is because I am doing everything so high up in the air,” he said.
And before he'd won multiple gold medals in the Olympics, White had established himself as a star at the Summer X Games, where he won gold in 2007, silver in 2005 and bronze in 2008 in the vert. After his second winter Olympics, he added another silver in 2010 and a gold in 2011.
That 2011 gold medal was his last appearance at the Summer X Games, before he was more devoted full-time to snowboarding.
At one point, he was enough of a household name in skateboarding to warrant a Shaun White Skateboarding video game.
If things had broken a little differently with skateboarding's eventual arrival as an Olympic sport, he might have been able to call himself a Summer Olympian as well.
White initially had a plan to try and qualify for skateboarding's debut in the 2020 Olympics, but ultimately called off his bid. Skateboarding was added as an event only in the park and street courses, and White is of course a specialist on the vert. It added a level of difficulty and unfamiliarity to try to qualify in the park event, and he wound up deciding it would be in his best interest to simply stay focused on the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
While the vert has been the source of some of skateboarding's most iconic achievements, there's no indication the Olympics will adopt it as a discipline going forward - meaning White will likely never get a chance to show his skateboarding skills on an Olympic stage now that his snowboarding is set to end.
But who knows? Maybe he'll dust off the skateboard and go for qualifying again in Paris 2024.
An Olympic champion three times going for his fourth on Thursday night, White is not the kind of athlete you count-out.