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Shaun White's Gold Medal Run: Extra Stoke for Olympics 2010

by Jordan Yerman | February 18, 2010 at 08:37 am

17078 views | 2 Recommendations | 2 comments

Shaun White's Gold Medal run last night showed why he's so fantastic for the sport. Shaun White could have just done a victory lap for his second run, having already clinched the Gold Medal. He could have also gone with some casual big air.

Instead, though, Shaun White's Gold Medal run was a tour de force, demonstrating not only why he's such a big star, but also how far the sport of Olympic halfpipe snowboarding has come since its debut in the 2006 Torino games. Shaun White culminated his run with the most difficult trick that currently exists: the now-legendary Double McTwist 1260, also called the Tomahawk: it involves two flips and three and a half rotations, and requires 18 feet of air to pull off.

Keene advised him to take a so-called victory lap -- "Some slashes and sprays and stuff," said White, "But I came all the way to Vancouver to do something amazing." And he did, throwing down an epic run -- it was scored 48.4 -- capped by the Tomahawk.

That's why we all know who Shaun White is. Snowboarding fans came from all over the world to watch the best of the best, and, at the end of the day, Shaun White delivered. I wish there was Youtube footage of me screaming at my TV screen, yelling, "Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!"

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sickmanstrange (not verified)

at 12:00 on February 18th, 2010

Tomahawk – named after a 30-ounce steak that Shaun ate in Colorado?? Nah. Surely it makes more sense that it’s an amalgamated reference to his old moniker ‘The Flying Tomato’, and his old mentor Tony Hawk. Either way, a kickass run, well worth missing a night's sleep for. I wonder what Mike McGill makes of it, more than 25 years after he invented the original McTwist.