“Shredding With Shaun,” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the February 2014 issue of Vogue.
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When I was a little boy and snow fell over London town, my sister and I used to take wooden tea trays to the gentle slopes by Whitestone Pond at the summit of Hampstead Heath. We would each hurtle in gleeful terror down the hill, generally arriving at the bottom in a tumbled mess of bobble hats, bruises, and woolen mittens that were thoughtfully linked by elastic ribbons (against potential separation and loss).
These were my first and last experiences navigating an ambulatory device on the snow.
My family didn t ski and neither did my childhood friends, and by the time I was moving in circles with people who spent their summers working as chalet girls and dallying with the dashing moniteurs, I felt it was simply too late to learn—and I didn t much care for fondue. Even more than the life-threatening dangers that seemed to lurk at every precipice, there were the clothes. I d look at Jacques-Henri Lartigue s wondrous images of Alpine adventures in the 1910s and at all those femmes fatales in their Chanel and Patou tweeds and furs, and the men in plus fours and finely patterned hand-knits and elegant lace-up boots, and then I d look at the ghastly puffy synthetic things and the paraplegic boots de nos jours, and—well, you know the rest. If they could so disfigure the Princess of Wales that she looked like a Smurf-blue Michelin Man, what hope was there for little moi?
Fast-forward several decades, however, and Anna s proverbial lightbulb has lit up at the prospect of my midlife conversion to the joys of the slopes, and specifically to the edgy art of the snowboard.
This is the plan: I will go up to Vermont to hang with Jake Burton, the guru and godfather of the sport, and his posse at Burton HQ, and then, duly kitted out and armed with my custom Burton board, I will hightail it to Keystone in Colorado, thither to be taught the art of careening down the snowy slopes from the top of a 12,000-foot mountain at breakneck speed while clamped to a piece of fiberglass and wood the shape of a giant s ice cream spatula. Way to go, Anna. But lo, there is more! In Colorado my snowboard Svengali will be none other than il pomodoro volante himself, Shaun White, the Titian-haired titan of the sport who won Olympic gold in Turin in 2006 and then again in Vancouver in 2010, and bids fair to do jolly well in Sochi, too. Oh, yes, and he can execute a Double McTwist 1260 somersault (he calls it a Tomahawk, and he can call it what he wants: He invented it) some 25 feet above the surface of the Earth. Cue sharp intake of breath.
Up in Burlington, Vermont, two weeks before Thanksgiving, the mood chez Burton is euphoric: Powdery snow has fallen a week before it was expected, so the 350 or so employees can forsake the skateboard run at the office for the joys of the slopes. Jake, their leader, is highly personable, avuncular, and a kid at heart—as any serious snowboarder seems to be. And his staff, who are evangelical in their snowboarding passions, are also so chill and laid back that they are practically horizontal.
Then there are the dogs. To say that this is a dog-friendly work environment would be a masterpiece of understatement. There are 130 canines registered, and I m not talking teacup Pomeranians. These are butch mountain dogs (Jake has Lily, a white retriever), and they roam in packs or curl up proprietorially on the inviting sofas that seem to have been thoughtfully placed hither and yon for their express comfort. There are bowls of dog biscuits on the reception desk.
In the Burton entrance, which is warmed by a raging log fire that a brace of hounds are sunning themselves in front of, the walls are hung with a snowboard history, including Jake s earliest prototypes, inspired by something called the Snurfer. (At the 1979 Snurfing championship, Jake turned up with his custom board that had a binding to secure his feet to its surface—and snowboarding was born.) “I was a loser in shop class!” laughs Jake, who made more than 100 prototypes before he got anywhere near a board that could surf the snow. He then had to take his rudimentary boards on the road and persuade storekeepers to stock them. “That was brutal,” he says of a lonely period he calls his “Willy Loman time.” “Surf shops didn t want it, ski shops didn t want it, skate shops . . . nobody wanted any part of it. One time I left with 35 boards and I came back with 37,” an irate store owner having returned two unsold examples he had bought the season earlier. But gradually, pockets of fearless, often self-harming aficionados sprung up around the country; Jake knew almost all of them.
Keeping the board s downhill edge off the snow turns out to be absolute murder on the hamstrings
Snowboarding wasn t recognized by the Olympics until Nagano in 98, where Jake was disheartened to find it misspelled snoboarding. The boarders were sent out in “a driving rainstorm” that the skiers were not allowed to compete in. “That was discouraging,” he remembers. At Sochi 2014, it is expected to be the most popular of the winter sports.
My board features a design of lilac camellias, taken from a Tom Ford tuxedo that I wore to my fiftieth, and the underside spells BURTON in the VOGUE-logo font. In the on-site Burton store, lilac bindings are screwed on, and I m fitted for the rest of the extensive panoply of accoutrements, delighted that Pharrell Williams s collaboration includes an ensemble in vivid Chinese yellow with Peruvian textile accents. And that Shaun White s latest collection is seventies shagadelic black denim with skintight flares and rivet trim—clearly crafted to his own compact and wiry dimensions. I practically have to lie on the changing-room floor to force my legs into the pants sized, distressingly, L. These collections are all masterminded by Greg Dacyshyn, Burton s colorful chief creative officer. Dacyshyn (as everyone seems to call him) has designed the American snowboarders Olympic uniform, and I m the first person outside the company to see it. Based on a vintage American patchwork quilt, it has a subtle, poetic Days of Heaven spirit. Shaun, it seems, has yet to be convinced. “We ll see how I look in cords,” he will tell me later, eyebrow askew.
In beauteous Stowe I am staying at the rambling Mountain Lodge; as the season doesn t start for another week, it s eerily like The Shining with its endless echoing corridors and empty high ceilinged restaurants. But the baby slope is a moment s walk away. It s quite a palaver to get my boots clamped to the board without toppling over, but the fundamental issue seems to be keeping the board s downhill edge off the snow, a simple enough concept that turns out to be absolute murder on the hamstrings (which luckily have been taking a hammering at Equinox, where ex-pro boxer Jared has been remorselessly putting me through my snowboard-prep paces). Shaun himself focuses on biometrics; he can t afford to bulk up too much or he d be top-heavy on his board. “He s borderline frail,” says Jake. “Sinewy.” After a lifetime of landing on them from great heights, Shaun s legs, as I will discover, are parenthetical, à la Charlie Chaplin s Little Tramp, further exaggerated by the second-skin pants he likes to wear.
On the snow Jake is very protective and coolly reassuring. “It s great teaching people how to ride,” he says. “I taught my kids, and I had tears in my eyes.”
By way of example he sails down the slope himself with effortless elegance, the S bends he leaves in the fresh snow like the flourishes on Elizabeth I s signature. The air is so clear I m almost high on it, the views are ravishing, and Jake s careful guidance gives me a fool s courage.
Suitably prepped, I head out to Keystone in Colorado a week later.
The first thing that greets me in my condo apartment when I arrive in the dead of night is the head of a black bear, grinning from the wall—warning, if any were needed, not to wander off the beaten track in the dark here.
On the morrow there is the complication of getting into my kit, and then a clumsy walk to the ominous gondola.
Let it be noted for the record that I have a terrible fear of heights. I foolishly booked a pod on the London Eye for my father s seventieth and spent the entire agonizingly slow revolution clinging to the bench and sobbing gently as my infant nephew and his friends gleefully pressed their bodies against the pod s glass bottom and sides, and friends knocked back glasses of bubbly and admired the Alexandra Palace six miles to the north. So it is with no small degree of trepidation that I set off.
But here s the thing. I do have my heart in my mouth, but less from abject terror than sheer awe at the unimaginable majesty of the landscape, with its great white mountains bristling with towering pines, and the distant view to Lake Dillon (with its Atlantis-like nineteenth-century mining town buried beneath its glassy surface).
We stop partway up the mountain at the children s learning slope, a very good place to start. Jake is joined by Gabe L Heureux, a Burton photographer and team manager, and together they guide me through the serpentine turns. My confidence slowly grows until I look at iPhone footage and am confronted by the disquieting vision of a stooped crone in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. The following day the affable British-born Mark Lawes, a veteran of 20 seasons in New Zealand, three in Scotland, and fifteen in Keystone, is added to the ever-expanding team of my snowboarding enablers—which now includes Shaun White himself. I ve managed to put my wrist guards on back to front. “I put my bindings on backward for a competition once,” laughs Shaun. “That was the last time I did my own gear!”
Mark is focused on getting me to look up, to admire the admirable views. If I were driving I wouldn t be looking at the pedals, would I?
“I m slightly a bad coach,” says Shaun. “I don t really analyze things; I explain everything from feeling.” But his low-key counsel is powerful. “When you twist your upper body, your lower will follow,” he tells me. “It s all led by your upper shoulder . . . keep it kind of flowing. Once you clear that subtle hurdle,” he adds, “you can go anywhere; the whole mountain opens up!”
The plan is to chill for the afternoon, but after lunch I cannot wait to get back on the snow. It is driving me to distraction seeing skiers and snowboarders gleefully descending in stylish sweeps and turns, and the final straw is when I notice a mother and her tiny daughter—who cannot be more than four years old—sailing confidently down the epic mountain face together.
That evening, a dinner with the effortlessly charming Shaun proves revelatory. He has just returned from Austria, where he was working on his jumps. He trains for half-pipe and slopestyle separately (the latter event, which will make its Olympic debut in Sochi, is a series of linked jumps and tricks on steel rails). His trademark red hair, once as long and luxuriant as that of a Charles II-era rake, has been trimmed short with a bouncy pompadour. Shaun favors Burberry and Saint Laurent, which both cut clothes to suit his lean body type. Although he now travels in style with vintage Vuitton luggage that he finds at Maxfield in Los Angeles, it wasn t until he was 21, when he began to design a line for Target, that he discovered shopping. “I didn t know you could try on clothes!” he tells me. “Since I was eight years old I was sponsored. I d just go to a warehouse and look at a picture of a T-shirt or whatever and be like, ‘That s cool.’ ”
How did all this begin?
“I was this horrible kid,” he remembers. Born with a heart defect, he nevertheless strapped on skis at four. “I had so much energy, my parents were like, ‘We ll put him on a snowboard; he ll fall all the time, and we ll keep track of him.’ They just figured I wouldn t get the hang of it.”
Clearly they miscalculated. Shaun hero-worshipped his brother, Jesse, seven years his elder, and was soon mastering all his snowboarding tricks, too. His parents entered him for a race, which he won, at the age of six. “They didn t make boards my size, and they didn t make boots my size, so I wore ski boots,” he says. Burton came to the rescue, sponsoring him at seven. “That was a helping hand in the beginning because it was hard, you know, for a family of five to afford ski passes, lodging, food up at the mountain, all of these things,” Shaun says. The family had been sleeping in camper vans at swank resorts like Aspen, and forgoing elaborate Christmas gifts to save money.
“I got the taste for winning when I was fifteen, and then at sixteen I won everything,” he says matter-of-factly. His winnings included “five or six cars”—which he was too young to drive. “I donated a couple of them,” he remembers, and one—a Lexus hybrid—he wrapped in a “big red bow” and surprised his mother with. When he first turned pro, his mother was worried that it “could be a flash in the pan” and wanted to make sure that his education wasn t neglected. “I just kind of squeaked through middle school,” he admits, but with his relentless travel schedule, “high school was the hard one. By the time I d come home and catch up on all the work, I d leave again. Unsustainable.” He was struggling to keep up and asked for help but remembers being told by his school, “We don t find your sport legitimate. We can t help you.”
I ve managed to put my wrist guards on back to front. “I put my bindings on backward for a competition once,” laughs Shaun
At the time, however, as Shaun notes, “I was making money, real money.” So at the tender age of sixteen he got himself a mortgage and bought a house in a new school district where his passion was encouraged.
“I m sure they re kicking themselves now,” he says, laughing, of his former school.
Shaun feels that his success was a vindication for his family, who had been criticized by their community and Shaun s teachers through the years and been told, as he recalls, “ ‘Your kid s gonna have no future.’ That s why that first Olympics meant so much. It was more like we did it than I did it.”
The following morning I am back on the baby slopes, and by the end of the session Mark lets go every now and then, and I experience the unmatchable adrenaline thrill of scything down the hill in great wide sweeps—a frightening liberation, like a feral animal born in captivity suddenly released from its cage into the unknowable wilderness.
In the afternoon I watch Shaun practice on a private slopestyle run that has been specially constructed for him. As he streaks down the mountainside, kicking up fountain sprays of snow, or skimming off a rail high above the ground, or gently clipping the dome of a feature shaped like an oil can, it s difficult to express the poetry of his art.
But it came to me in what is surely one of the more surreal sentences I ve ever written. From my notes: “In the hot tub with Shaun White, I noticed the tattoos on his arms.” One represents a Native American symbol for a storm; the other is more personal. Shaun asked a snowboard artist he d worked with and whose nineteenth century-almanac style he admired to design a tattoo that represented him. The result? A potent image of a lion on a cloud. Simply can t wait for Sochi.