Alyssa RoenigkFeb 1, 2026, 07:57 AM ETCloseAlyssa Roenigk is a senior writer for ESPN whose assignments have taken her to six continents and caused her to commit countless acts of recklessness. (Follow @alyroe on Twitter).Follow on XMultiple Authors
SHAUN WHITE HAS been here before. Standing in front of a floor-length mirror in a hotel room in Snowmass Village, Colorado, he studies his image. All-black snowboard gear. A competition bib with an American flag sewn onto the front. An unrelenting expression. It’s all so familiar.
This is the first time White, 39, has seen himself in a snowboard bib since he last competed, at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and something stirs. “I got all pumped up. I was like, that looks good,” he says. “That feels good. That old feeling, it calls me. It doesn’t go away.”
“When I focus on what I’m not doing, I miss competing,” White says. “But when I focus on what I am doing, I’m inspired. I still feel the glow of the career I had.”
White knows that if he put everything aside and returned to training, he could still be one of the best halfpipe snowboarders in the U.S. He sees other retired athletes making splashy comebacks and visualizes himself doing the same. “It’s been an internal war,” he says.
He takes one last look in the mirror and imagines what it would feel like to drop into a halfpipe wearing a competition bib again, hear the roar of a crowd and feel a rush of adrenaline. “Standing at the top of the halfpipe wearing that bib,” White says, “it would have been too much for me.”
White leads a riders’ meeting at the inaugural stop of The Snow League, the contest series he founded to provide what he believes has been missing from the sport: better paydays, a more relatable television broadcast and a cohesive championship. White endured countless meetings like this during his nearly 30 years as a competitor, but he never believed he was part of the conversation. He wants the riders seated in front of him to feel like they can shape what this league becomes.
“Shaun is bringing in new sponsors and a lot of visibility and opportunities for us,” says 19-year-old Bea Kim, who was recently named to her first U.S. Olympic halfpipe team. “He wants to know what the athletes think, so the sport will go in the direction that we want it to go.”
Throughout the weekend, White is seemingly everywhere, channeling his relentless focus into even the smallest details. When he doesn’t like the look of the merch lying folded on a table in the VIP lounge, he finds someone to hang the sweatshirts and jackets. When he learns that American competitor Maddie Mastro’s mic has fallen off during a practice run, he sprints to the production truck and tells someone to find “really sticky tape” and get to the top of the halfpipe, stat.
He gives interviews, shoots social content, takes runs with guests, woos future partners and hosts nightly afterparties. He sits in the broadcast booth during qualifiers, announces the musical guests between heats and hands out trophies by luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co.
Looking around The Snow League, White’s ideas are everywhere, too, thoughtful touches he would have appreciated when he was competing: Pelotons in the athlete lounge so riders can warm up for competition, lockers with the riders’ names on them and on-demand shuttle service. Instead of the standard one-size-fits-all competition bibs, the athletes wear custom zip-front jerseys with their names and numbers on the front and back.
Rather than rely on translators, White and his team also hired a bilingual sideline reporter to interview the Japanese athletes who regularly dominate the podiums. “That was a lightbulb moment,” says Tom Yaps, a longtime agent who represents Mastro and freeski star Eileen Gu. “It was so thoughtful and respectful, and it will be copied.”
“This setup creates a real challenge and builds drama and rivalries that fans will want to follow,” he says. “I want the sport to be seen as an accumulation of an entire season, not just one-off events.”
Even the top snowboarders and freeskiers rely heavily on sponsorships and bonuses to supplement their contest winnings. White hopes The Snow League will change that by awarding the largest prize purse in the sport: $50,000 to the winners at each stop, down to $2,500 to the eighth-place finisher, plus a $5,000 appearance fee and an additional payout to the overall champs.
Japan’s Sena Tomita, the 2022 X Games champ and Olympic halfpipe bronze medalist, missed a year of competition after Beijing because of health issues and took a significant hit to her earnings. The week after she won the inaugural event in Aspen — and the prize money — she sent The Snow League a letter.
“She’s like, ‘I take the Greyhound bus overnight to meet with my sponsors,'” says Miles Nathan, White’s longtime friend, business partner and co-founder of The Snow League. “‘I won the first event, and it changed my life.'”
“That was a turning point for me,” White says. “I realized, I’m here to compete, and I want to win, and I’m done vying for your approval. In the end, I would rather be happy with myself and my decisions than get the approval of somebody I’m competing against.”
“Back then, there was a sense of it not mattering what the results were or what brand you represented,” says Burton owner Donna Carpenter. “We were all part of this unusually inclusive community because snowboarders had been excluded from so many places. We saw ourselves as being outside of the mainstream, and Shaun stuck out because he had his eye on the prize.”
There were those who believed White changed the sport too fast. He was the first snowboarder to hire a mainstream agent, appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and pioneer risky tricks many questioned were even possible within the constraints of 22-foot halfpipe walls. Although snowboarding has evolved, it has never fully embraced the level of fierce ambition that White unapologetically embodied.
“When I first started competing, it was weird. You’d get to the bottom of your run, and everybody said the same thing: ‘It’s nice weather. I’m having a good time. I’m just super stoked to be out here riding with my friends,'” White says. “As I grew into my own, I was honest. I was like, ‘I’m disappointed. I landed that run six times in practice and I just blew it in the competition.'”
“I like to think the decisions I made in my career and how I conducted myself in interviews gives new competitors the road map to be competitive, to say, ‘I’m here to win,'” he says.
White believes The Snow League will provide those competitors with a platform to earn an unprecedented level of money, respect and recognition. “I achieved a level of fame and success in my career that I know wasn’t accessible to everyone,” White says. “Every rider in this league deserves that.”
WHITE IS BACK where he began, surrounded by energetic young snowboarders and dropping into a halfpipe on the Palmer Glacier at Oregon’s Mount Hood. He throws a few airs and then starts launching tricks, including his signature skyhook. A young rider lands a crippler 540, takes her board off at the bottom of the pipe and starts hiking back to the top. “Nice crippler. That looked good,” White says.
At this camp session in mid-July, sponsored by The Snow League, he has flown in Olympians Maddy Schaffrick and Nick Goepper, who give pointers to young campers and play in a series of intense dodgeball games. White hands out boards to more than 200 kids.
“I was like, ‘If you came to camp, even if you’re a skier, you’re getting a board,'” White says. “It was so fulfilling in so many ways because I remember being that age, going to camp. I’m like, ‘We’re locking in core memories for these kids.'”
Watch White as he hikes Hood’s new 22-foot pipe, paid for by his investment, and sessions the 18-footer with young riders and it’s clear this is his comfort zone. Sure, he also lives the jet set life of a millionaire retired athlete. But here, he vibrates at a higher frequency. He loves being the guy, having kids shout his name and ask for advice.
“To be around Shaun the last couple days and watch him snowboarding, it’s not the riding itself but the little idiosyncrasies between the riding, the speed at which he was hiking up the pipe and the tricks he was doing,” Goepper says. “As an athlete who’s still in the middle of it, I can tell when someone’s working and when someone’s living — and all I can say is, he must love it.”
THE CLOUDS SHIFT and the summer sun floods the corner of the porch where White sits. He’s wearing drawstring shorts and a white T-shirt, and it won’t be long before he’s also sporting a sunburn. “Wanna pop inside?” he says and opens the slider to the house he’s renting in Mount Hood with his family, Nathan, and Whitespace CEO Sonny McCracken.
When White retired, he kept himself busy traveling the world with his fiancée, actress Nina Dobrev, and saying yes to every invitation. He knew that when he stopped moving, he would struggle to adjust to life without the built-in rhythms of a snowboard season and the drive to be the best. He had only known one life since he was 6, and so few people understood what that life was like.
But look around this house and it’s clear White has found a way to rebuild that life, down to the rhythms of the snowboard season and the singular focus on creating something great. Snowboard boots litter the room. Boards line the entrance. His family is here. Later this morning, he’ll take runs through the pipe with his dad and lap the chairlift with Kari and her kids.
He even drops into 22-foot halfpipes now and again. A few months from now, he’ll launch a front double cork 1080 at the bottom of a run during a television shoot in Colorado.
“I talked to Tom Brady, and he obviously knows the feeling of wanting to come back,” White says. “I kind of felt for him because I was like, ‘How can he get his fix?'”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t obsess over thoughts of dropping everything and learning a backside triple cork, a trick that would place him in medal contention in Italy.