Shaun White: the snowboarder's new tricks

Last winter, as part of his preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, snowboarder Shaun White embarked upon a scheme of Bond- villain proportions. It was bold, it was unfeasibly expensive, and it would seal his domination of the sport for years to come. It even had a villainous name: Project-X. Unlike a Bond villain's plot, however, it had every chance of success.

The plan was simply this: White and his principal sponsor, Red Bull, would build a private, million-dollar Olympic-size half-pipe in the Colorado back country. It would be hidden away from the avaricious eyes of his fellow competitors, and it would include a giant soft-landing area – in the form of a steel cage filled with foam rubber – for White to develop and perfect a range of extraordinary new tricks. In short, it would be a secret laboratory for new moves that would ensure a win in the most acrobatic of Olympic snowboarding disciplines, the half-pipe.

A site was chosen in an avalanche zone in a remote valley in the back country of the San Juan mountain range in the Rockies, behind the old mining town of Silverton. In the months before work on the half-pipe began, a team from Silverton's ski area flew around the site after each snowstorm in a helicopter, dropping 25lb explosive charges to trigger avalanches and build up the amount of snow in the area where the pipe would be. The snow debris, packed hard by the violence of each avalanche, was perfect material to press into an icy-walled pipe.

White's team employed Frank Wells, a man with the reputation of being the best half-pipe architect in the world, to cut the 550ft-long tube, and Wells and his team of snow-sculptors worked long into the night for a week, moving 250,000 cubic yards of snow. Then they brought up the foam pit. This open-topped steel cage, 20ft wide, 30ft long and 8ft deep, weighed four tonnes and had to be hauled 1,000 miles from Lake Tahoe where it was built. It was towed and pushed the last seven miles to the site on skids through a snowstorm.