“It’s like finding dad’s old records,” Shaun White says. “You’re like, ‘whoa.’”
After his final Olympic games and the announcement of his retirement from snowboarding, White got to work with Rizzoli and has produced a book, “Shaun White: Airborne” that gives a behind-the-scenes look at his life and career.
The idea to do a photography book originally came from White. After the last Olympics and his retirement announcement, “there was a lot of talk,” he says, and following the release of his documentary “Shaun White: The Last Run” on Max, he realized how hard it is to fit a life into a couple hours of film, he said.
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“And I thought this was a fun way to pull the curtain back a little further on some of these special moments, and what I was thinking or feeling,” White says from New York, where he and girlfriend Nina Dobrev like to spend every fall. He’s had photographers around him his whole life, so there was no shortage of content to select from.
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“They were thrilled. They’re like, ‘I knew you’d call me one day,’” he says.
The book is an opportunity for White to be seen as not just a competitor, but a human being; he specifically wanted to include personal moments and memories that show his whole personality.
“What’s been portrayed in the media a lot is the fierce competitor that comes out of me when I’m backed into a corner with one run to go, or if odds are stacked against me or if I get injured, I have to come back from the injury to try to win that determination. And when it’s portrayed that way enough, you can think of somebody as an island. But I definitely had a lot of amazing people around me, and I think that the book really shows the camaraderie and the team effort that it was to get me to where I am today,” White says. “I really love that part of it. You get to see that rather than just the edited sports doc. And that’s a thrilling, exciting thing, but I feel like this is a story not as often told.”
“There was one competition where I set the world record for the highest air. It’s actually the photo we use on the back of the book, on the sleeve. But that day for me was really crazy because a friend of mine had passed away and I hadn’t snowboarded in a few months, and there was a lot of grieving that was going on,” White recalls. “And I remember finally getting to release that sort of energy, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m back on the snow. Let’s put this behind. Life’s going to keep going.’ And it’s just crazy that all that went into that first hit in the halfpipe, and I set this record. It was this moment, and they got the photo. My buddy snapped the shot of it. It was so perfect. Everything kind of came together. I ended up winning the competition. But to talk about that and to show that there’s a human behind the competitor and to show that, yeah, I was going through a lot in my life in that moment, and snowboarding was there for me, and it displayed itself in a certain manner. It’s wild to really bring people in and talk about those things.”
Since retiring, White has been busy at work on his line Whitespace, which recently added women’s into its offering — at the suggestion of Dobrev, who’s been wearing the unisex goods but kept suggesting White add women’s apparel.
“I feel like you get to be a little bit more playful with some of the things, some of the colors, some of the fits, the trims, those things,” he says of the women’s pieces. “So I’m so thrilled and everybody that’s tried it on is really happy and excited.”
Now in its second season, the snowboard clothing and gear company gives him the opportunity to still be competitive — just about different things these days.
“We switched factories for the hard goods, the actual boards. I was like, ‘These are amazing, but I know they can be better.’ Especially for me, I’ve been testing these boards, I know what we need. And so I’m so thrilled to say that the board’s even better now with the new factory,” White says. “I would love to build a team, have that next generation of rider. We have a few people that were sending products to some young, talented riders, and it’s just so cool to see. I remember being that age and getting my first board and it blew my mind. I still have it. So to be that for another generation, it’s just so thrilling.”
As for the rest of retired life, he’s taken the advice of other retired athletes who told him to keep working out in the gym, despite no longer having that be a necessity, and otherwise take some time before starting any major new projects.
“They were like, ‘be OK with the nothingness for a bit. You’re going to want to jump on something else to fill the shoes of the thing that you’ve been doing for so long. But if you can settle into that place of retired, the more you let go, the more rewarding it will be,’” he says. “I wish I could say I fully let go, but I’m still in the process of it. It’s going to take some time.”