2026 Olympics -- Why snowboarding still needs Shaun White - ESPN

SHAUN WHITE HAS been here before. Standing in front of a floor-length mirror in a hotel room in Snowmass Village, Colorado, he studies his image. All-black snowboard gear. A competition bib with an American flag sewn onto the front. An unrelenting expression. It's all so familiar.

This is the first time White, 39, has seen himself in a snowboard bib since he last competed, at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and something stirs. «I got all pumped up. I was like, that looks good,» he says. «That feels good. That old feeling, it calls me. It doesn't go away.»

But White isn't in Aspen to compete. In a few hours, he will take a ceremonial run through the Buttermilk Mountain halfpipe to open the March 2025 contest that has brought him to town. He's nervous. Not about riding a halfpipe again, but about how he might feel while he's riding. For three years, he's worked to unravel who he is beyond Shaun White the competitor — without judges, medals and cheering sections defining him. He doesn't want to squander that progress.

«When I focus on what I'm not doing, I miss competing,» White says. «But when I focus on what I am doing, I'm inspired. I still feel the glow of the career I had.»

White knows that if he put everything aside and returned to training, he could still be one of the best halfpipe snowboarders in the U.S. He sees other retired athletes making splashy comebacks and visualizes himself doing the same. «It's been an internal war,» he says.

Over the years, White has stood eye to eye with versions of this reflection as he faced similar crossroads. There was the prodigy deciding whether to conform or change snowboarding; the teen star with late-night show charm grappling with becoming the mainstream face of a sport