Farewell to the Flying Tomato: how Shaun White left an Olympic legacy

This time Ayumu Hirano would not be denied. Not by the judges. Not even by the greatest snowboarder in history. Instead, amid the most intense pressure and anger, the 23-year-old from Japan found the halfpipe equivalent of the holy grail.

And as Hirano stood on the podium with his gold medal there was a sense of something else too. That a torch was being passed from one generation to the next, as if by osmosis, from Shaun White to Hirano: from the goat to the new breed of bucks pushing at the boundaries like the American once did.

Without White, the Olympics might not have Hirano, or Chloe Kim, or Eileen Gu. The now 35-year-old finished his competitive career here, without a medal but with his legacy sitting above him in the medal table. The one-time teenage phenom known as the Flying Tomato, who brought the cool of the X Games to the Olympic arena and dragged the rest with him, finished fourth in his fifth Olympics.

White, the defending champion who won three Olympic titles going back to 2006 among those five appearances, called it the run of Hirano’s young life. It was that and more. The triple cork 1440 is so fiendishly difficult that, until Friday morning in Beijing, no one had ever attempted it and gone on to finish their run.

White had tried in training, in 2013, and it hospitalised him. Yet from the moment Hirano slid down the pipe and soared 5.5 metres in the air it was on. Over the next second or so, the Japanese rider then became a human gyroscope, spinning four full rotations while simultaneously inverting three times. More tricks followed and long before the judges conferred, and awarded him a score of 96.00, victory was his.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet but finally one of my childhood dreams has come true,” he