Shaun WhiteThe return to Winter X Games ended before he could make his first run in almost three years.
White sprained one knee in training the week before the snowboarding halfpipe event on Sunday night in Aspen, Colorado, according to his social media.
“After talking to the medical team, we decided that moving forward would only make things worse,” White posted on Instagram about four hours before the contest. “It is a difficult decision to make, but I just need to give my knee some time to recover and I will be back soon.”
White, 34, competed for the last time on snowboarding at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Games, taking his third gold medal. He returned to cycling after an aborted attempt to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics on skate.
“Each time it’s like a new attempt, ”said White, who next year will be older than any man to compete in an Olympic snowboard halfpipe, in a video interview from X Games last week. “I really didn’t, like, turn off the gas. You may not see me, but I am still doing all the things I need. “
White’s long-awaited return to the X Games, his first time in the biggest annual snowboard competition since 2017, was heralded as a final showdown with the Australian Scotty James. James took bronze at PyeongChang and won three of the last four X Games titles.
But 19 year old Japanese Yuto Totsuka won in Aspen, defeating James for the third straight game in a row and marking himself as the Olympic favorite of 2022. Totsuka, 11th in PyeongChang as the youngest participant, took first place on Sunday based on the overall impression, rather than any one of his four runs is scored.
He had a pair of 1440 in one of his races, according to commentators.
James came in second, followed by another Japanese, Ruka Hirano. Taylor Gold was the best American in fourth. At least one American has made it to the halfpipe podium in the first 23 editions of the X Games in the United States, but none has risen in the past two years.
At the beginning of the last day of competition, Sunday, snowboarder Jamie Anderson won his eighth X Games title, but the first on the air.
Anderson, two-time Olympic champion and seven-time X Games champion in slopestyle, won a large aerial field that included all the medalists from the last three X Games, in addition to each 2018 Olympic medalist, led by the Austrian Anna Gasser (which was the seventh on Sunday).
Anderson, 30, is already the only snowboarder woman with multiple Olympic titles. She said after winning the slopestyle title on Friday that she thought this could be her last competitive season, but now she doesn’t know when she will retire.
Anderson is a Winter X Games medal less than the Canadian snowboarder’s record of 20 Mark McMorris and two gold medals behind the American snowboarder women’s record Lindsey Jacobellis.
American men won the slopestyle snowboard (Dusty Henricksen) and slopestyle skiing (Nick Goepper)
Henricksen, a 17-year-old X Games rookie, became the first male snowboarder in the United States to win an X Games Aspen slopestyle since White in 2009. Previously, his biggest title was the 2020 Youth Winter Olympics.
He won a course that included the Olympic champion Gerard Red (seventh on Sunday). Missing X Games five-time champion McMorris, who lost the X Games for the first time since its debut in 2011 due to a positive coronavirus test.
Goepper, an Olympic silver and bronze medalist, won his fourth slopestyle ski title at the X Games and the first since a treble in 2013-15.
What lies ahead for snowboarders and freeskiers is unclear. The biennial world championships scheduled for China in February have been canceled, but can be rescheduled.
The Burton US Open, usually the end of the season in late February or early March for snowboarders, was also canceled due to the pandemic.
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