KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia - Shaun White is no longer king of the Olympic snowboard halfpipe. In fact, he is not even a medalist.
After dominating the sport over the past two Winter Games, White faltered on both of his runs in the finals Tuesday night. Iouri Podladtchikov of Switzerland, known as I-Pod, won with a score of 94.75, and two riders from Japan - Ayumu Hirano, with a score of 93.50, and Taku Hiraoka, with a 92.25 - took silver and bronze.
Podladtchikov, who grew up in Davos but competed for Russia at the 2006 Turin Games, and Hirano, a sprightly 15-year-old, were among those expected to challenge White for gold. They delivered, and White was unable to put together a clean run. His best score in the finals, on his second run, was 90.25.
Podladtchikov, a Russian-born Swiss, is among the few riders who can sometimes match White's acrobatics; his YOLO ("You Only Live Once") flip, 1,440 degrees of rotation that includes two aerial somersaults, was a rare trick that White did not master first.
And the 5-foot-3, 110-pound Hirano was just 14 when he finished second to White at the 2013 X Games. That got White's attention, partly because White, who turned professional at 13 and excelled as a skateboarder, saw so much of himself in Hirano.
Concerns over the condition of the massive halfpipe threatened the competition earlier in the day, but organizers scrambled to get it into decent shape. The night before, some athletes suggested that the event be postponed because the flat area between its 22-foot walls was bumpy and filled with loose, granular snow. It caused riders to crash not during their dangerous, gravity fighting tricks, but between them.
Crews worked overnight honing the shape of the pipe, which tilted downhill for about 250 yards. In the hour before the competition, workers sprinkled salt on its surface to get it to melt slightly and refreeze, and they sprayed it with water from large hoses. The result was not perfection, but adequacy.
"It's bumpy, but it's much better than practice," Danny Davis said after his afternoon qualifying runs.
It was more than good enough for most of the top riders. Others took falls in the gutter of the pipe while a few flew above its walls and crashed hard on the deck. Qualifications weeded the unlikely podium crashers out of the contest. Temperatures close to freezing during the prime-time finals helped keep the pipe intact.
White came to Sochi hoping to win two gold medals, having spent a year preparing for the debut of slopestyle, an event he dominated on the snowboarding circuit a decade ago. But after a couple of days of training on the slopestyle course last week, amid concerns over the size and shapes of the jumps, he pulled out of the event to focus on the halfpipe.
"With the practice runs I have taken, even after course modifications and watching fellow athletes get hurt, the potential risk of injury is a bit too much for me to gamble my other Olympics goals on," White said in a statement on the eve of the slopestyle contest. His fellow American Sage Kotsenburg won the event.
The 12-man halfpipe finals featured three of the four Americans. Taylor Gold and Greg Bretz, who beat White at a Dew Tour event in December, made it through qualifications to earn spots in a semifinal round. Bretz made it through to the final, but Gold did not.
Gold, at the end of a nearly flawless second run, fell onto his backside on the last trick. He held his hands to his head, knowing that it cost him a chance at the final. It did. Needing to finish in the top six, Gold was eighth.
White and Davis went there directly from the afternoon qualifying runs. Judges rewarded White with a leading score of 95.75, and Davis earned a 92.0.
"I've got to step it up to beat Shaun," Davis said. "He'll have to step up his run as well. It'll be an interesting final."
Davis was 10th in the finals, and Bretz was 12th.
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