One board legend to another: Tony Hawk urges Shaun White to "keep riding"

“My advice to Shaun White, when it’s all over, would be this: Keep riding.”

That’s what Tony Hawk – among the best skateboarders of all-time and his sport’s most recognisable icon – told Olympics.com just a few hours before White, the greatest halfpipe snowboarder in history, took the last run of his competitive career at these Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022.

“But do it for fun,” Hawk continued, perhaps remembering his own retirement from nearly 20 years of professional competition skateboarding, back in 2003. “That’s what fuels you. It’s about that extension of yourself and that outlet.”

Tony Hawk and Shaun White share much in common.

They both have roots in Carlsbad, California – on the edges of San Diego. They’re both legends in the world of boardsports – Hawk as the greatest-ever halfpipe (vert) skateboarder and White as an innovator and two-decade dominator of snowboarding’s version of the same apparatus.

The end of White’s competitive career played out last night in the massive halfpipe at the Genting Snow Park. And under the brightest lights on the Olympic stage (his fifth Winter Games, spanning 16 years).

And such was the power of his lore and the memory of his three previous Olympic golds, that most still expected White, at the age of 35, ravaged by injuries and without having won a competition since he pulled off a pair of 1440s for gold in PyeongChang in 2018, to go out on top.

That’s what happens when you’re the best for so long. No one can imagine you losing.

But all things end.

He was in pain. He wasn’t among the favourites. And he was up against some of the best of an outrageous new breed of rider who, willingly and enthusiastically, admit the huge debt of gratitude they owe to White’s two decades of