ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Shaun White was 45 minutes into an hour-plus-long stretch of interviews with every major media outlet on earth. At the base of the Olympic halfpipe, where he’d just finished fourth, he’d told the same stories, recited the same anecdotes, offered the same observations on his just-concluded career. And finally, it just got to be too much.
With a battery of cameras looming over him, White knelt on the snow. He put one hand on his black-and-white Whitespace board, one on the snow, closed his eyes and said “thank you, thank you,” over and over again.