From the Archives: Hamish Bowles Hits the Slopes with Shaun White

“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.