Shaun White Drops Out of Sochi's 'Sketchy' Slopestyle Event

The New York Times reports, "Shaun White Pulls Out of New Event to Focus on Halfpipe."

And at this morning's Los Angeles Times, "Olympics 2014: Slopestyle event dares, but athletes hesitate":

SOCHI, Russia — In the parlance of the sport, it had to be gnarly.

Slopestyle, the newest Olympic event, was always going to be a flashy addition to the Games — an acrobatic, free-form assault on a snowy obstacle course of rails and jumps. Elements of danger wouldn't just be evident. They would be a selling point, a path that would lead "slope" from X Games curiosity to legitimacy at the highest levels of international sport.
But did the 2014 Winter Olympic Games go too far?

On Wednesday, Shaun White, the most famous snowboarder in the world and one of the Games' seminal faces, abruptly withdrew from slopestyle, a day before competition would begin for the first time at the Olympic level.

White's Olympics are not over; he is still scheduled to compete in another event, the halfpipe. That's no small matter — White is a halfpipe favorite, and capturing the gold would make him the first American man to win an event at three straight Winter Olympics.

But White's high-profile campaign to capture a medal in two events is done, another troubling development for a Winter Games that cost roughly $51 billion to stage, but has been beset by concerns over safety, cost overruns, human rights and construction woes. Much is at stake for Russia, which is hosting the Olympics for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

"The difficult decision to forgo slopestyle is not one I take lightly as I know how much effort everyone has put into holding the slopestyle event for the first time in Olympic history, a history I had planned on being a part of," White, 27, said in a statement.

White's decision was the culmination of days of mounting evidence that event organizers had overreached and assembled a course that was risky even by the standards of this daring, alternative sport — a course that crossed the line from "gnarly" to "sketchy," as another Finnish competitor put it...

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