Snowboarding's great leap forward

Is Shaun White in that mix? Hard to tell.

Though the three-time Olympic champion has worked on the trick over time, he also has abandoned it before, feeling it was too dangerous to pull off in a high-stakes contest.

White was nowhere near thinking about triple corks on Sunday. A broken binding ruined his first run and he fell on the first jump of his second. He executed back-to-back 1260-degree jumps for the first time this season, but ultimately finished seventh.

"I was fighting an uphill battle," White said. "I was just so happy to get a good run down."

He heads into the last Olympic qualifying contest, next month at Mammoth Mountain, California, without the podium finish that would give him an automatic spot on the US team. Even without that, he would almost certainly make the team as a coaches' pick, but the clock is ticking on the 35-year-old who is saying this will be his final Olympic journey.

Another American, Taylor Gold, finished second thanks to the sort of stylistic run, filled with difficult grabs and spins, that makes snowboarding purists drool, even if it doesn't include the sky-high tricks that capture the headlines.

"Those triples are hugely, hugely dangerous and risky, and to see somebody do that in an event is unreal," Gold said.