The pioneering snowboarder Shaun White bowed out after his fifth Games and in doing so passed the torch to Ayumu Hirano
This time Ayumu Hirano would not be denied. Not by the judges. Not even by the greatest snowboarder in history. Instead, amid the most intense pressure and anger, the 23-year-old from Japan found the halfpipe equivalent of the holy grail.
And as Hirano stood on the podium with his gold medal there was a sense of something else too. That a torch was being passed from one generation to the next, as if by osmosis, from Shaun White to Hirano: from the goat to the new breed of bucks pushing at the boundaries like the American once did.
