Legendary 'Palm' out to grab Olympic glory

At age 37, he seems more suited to an era gone by, a representative of snowboarding's limit-breaking rebellious roots, when riders took as much pride in antagonizing the staid skiing world as they did in dragging their knuckles down a makeshift halfpipe.

Yet with only six weeks remaining before the Olympic Games in Turin, "The Palm" once again finds himself in the mix. Not in a bar fight, but for a possible spot on the U.S. Olympic snowboard team as a competitor in the new Olympic discipline of snowboardcross.

"Palmer is still alive," U.S. snowboard team coach Peter Foley said Friday. "We earned another quota spot on the World Cup tour that we're using for qualifying in January, and (the coaches) decided that because he's got the speed and he's shown that he can do it in the past that we'll give him another shot at it. He's got two more chances to get it done."

Foley's choice of words to describe snowboarding's original bad boy alludes to much more than Olympic qualifying. Last Memorial Day weekend, Palmer made national headlines after drinking and drugging himself into a near-fatal coma that required a helicopter ride to a Reno, Nev., hospital from his hometown of South Lake Tahoe, Nev. That event reportedly served as the catalyst for change, with the Olympic ideal serving as the model.

"Shaun has always had a dream of going to the Olympics," longtime friend and agent Bob Klein said. "He was the world champion in halfpipe in '89 and '90, but that was a long time before snowboarding became an Olympic sport. Now he feels like he's got another shot with boardercross."

Palmer declined to be interviewed for this story.

In the sport of boardercross, Palmer always has a shot. According to another longtime friend, extreme skier Glen Plake, he and Palmer "invented the sport" as kids on Plake's backyard motocross track, racing the banked turns and jumps on snowy days before the nearby ski slopes were open.

The sport has advanced significantly since then, earning status in the Winter X Games in the 1990s, FIS World Cup a few years later and this season, the Winter Olympics, where four riders will line up at the top of the course and battle their way down an obstacle-riddled mountain course to the finish line.

Through the years, Palmer has earned five X Games gold medals in various incarnations of "cross" competition.

In order to qualify for one of four potential positions on the U.S. team, Palmer must finish among the top four overall in one of three remaining World Cup races (Jan. 4-5 in Austria and Jan. 15 in Italy) and be among the top U.S. point-winners on the World Cup circuit.