PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — It was exactly noon, 12 o’clock high, when Shaun White stared down the halfpipe, looking again for the top of the world. He wondered if, to win a third gold medal at a Winter Olympics, he could do it on the last run.
He had been there before.
“It was like this crazy déjà vu,” he said at the bottom of the halfpipe in 2018, thinking about Sochi in 2014. “I’m standing there, last guy to go, and I have to put it down.”
It did not happen four years ago, a rare disappointment for a man used to nothing but victories.