White: It's Sometimes Lonely at the Top

When snowboarder Shaun White won a gold medal at the last Winter Olympics in Italy, he was nicknamed "il pomodoro volante" - the flying tomato - for his aerial acrobatics and his fiery mane of red hair. He has since become one of the most recognizable redheads since Lucy and a veritable rock star in the world of action sports - a white hot virtuoso on a snowboard who, at the age of 23, commands a multi-million dollar empire.

Now, all eyes are on White to bring home the gold again this coming month in Vancouver, and he gave "60 Minutes" correspondent Bob Simon a sneak preview of a trick he thinks will help him win.

To see it, he took us to his very own top-secret training facility, hidden high, very high, in Colorado's rugged back country.

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The only way to get there? Helicopter.

It's not a bad way to travel - the scenery was breathtaking.

Then, at about 12,000 feet, just over a tree line, there it was: the snowboarding super pipe White had been keeping under wraps.

Carved right into the mountain, this 500-foot long pipe was built by one of his sponsors, Red Bull.

And it's just White's pipe - he doesn't have to share the facility with anyone else.

We touched down, he geared up, and hitched a ride to the very top.

This is why Shaun White is in the San Juan Mountains: this super pipe in the snow.

But why would anyone want one of these planted right in the middle of some of the worst avalanche country in America? Only someone as driven and determined as Shaun White, driven to develop new snowboarding techniques which he hopes will win him gold at the Olympics.

For two months, with his own camera team in tow, White taught himself a dizzying array of moves. First, to avoid injury, he tried them out in this foam pit.

Then he tried them on the unforgiving 22-foot-high walls of his half pipe. The pay-off? A new trick - two flips, three spins, all at once - daring, difficult and until then, undoable.

Asked if he's scared when he does a trick like that, White told Simon, "I'm a little nervous. I mean, you can throw the same things into the foam pit as much as you want, but at a certain point, you still have to get that kind of gall to throw it onto the actual wall of the half pipe."

White's landings weren't always soft, or perfect. His composure wasn't either when he had rough landings.

But that's one of the perks of training in the middle of the wilderness.

"Why didn't you build a pipe or use a pipe in a……civilized place like Vail or Aspen?" Simon asked.

"Ya know, it's just a really competitive sport and to keep your tricks private and to keep them a surprise and show up and do something new that's kinda, gonna blow some people away would be really nice," White explained.

That's exactly what he's been doing these past few weeks in competition: adding height, rotation and inspiration to every trick, throwing down the gauntlet to any snowboarder who wants to take him on in Vancouver.

Asked how he assesses his changes for the Olympics this year, White told Simon, "I think my chances are pretty good. I'm not gonna lie."

"Will you be disappointed if you get anything less than gold?" Simon asked.

"I'm really disappointed at every event if I don't do less than what I wanted to do. So yeah I think so…," White acknowledged.

"Silver's a nice color," Simon pointed out.

"It is nice," he agreed.

"But not for Shaun," Simon remarked.

"Yeah. I guess so. My beast of burden there," White replied.

A burden perhaps, but his competitive drive has earned him the kind of fame and fortune usually reserved for big-time athletes in far more mainstream sports.

It's not at all what Cathy and Roger White were going for when they took their six-year-old son off skis and put him on a snowboard.

"He was crazy on skis. And so I thought, 'Well, we'll put him on a snowboard and he'll fall all the time, and I won't have to worry about trying to dig him out of trees,'" White's mom explained.

She viewed it as a safety measure.

She had every reason to be protective: as a baby, Shaun White had undergone major surgery to repair a life-threatening defect of his heart.

"I've just had this fight since I can't even remember," he told Simon.

It soon became clear he would be unstoppable. By the age of seven, White was winning competitions and landed his first sponsor, Burton snowboards.

"And it wasn't 'cause I was awesome or anything. It was just because…I was kind of awesome. I don't want to lie," he told Simon.

But snowboarding took a lot of time and money. Back then, Cathy and Roger White didn't have much of either. Still, they managed to take their three kids from their home near San Diego to the mountains, where White could compete. They traveled, and slept in an old camper van.

Asked what it was like when they pulled into a resort in their van, Shaun White told Simon, "I don't think we were always welcome. We were pretty dirty to be in Aspen and stuff. They're like, 'You can't park that here.' Like the propane heater would break down in the middle of the night. And we're all sittin' in there. It was just wild times. And I think those are the times that make me appreciate what I have."

Like when he was a teenager and won more money in one contest in Japan, than his parents earned in an entire year. "And I was sitting there just eyeballs like this, looking at this pile of money," he remembered.

Asked how that made him feel, White told Simon, "I remember thinking that I'd way rather give my parents my money, and not have to like have them go to work anymore, you know what I me. Because I'd way rather spend more time with them."

He could do that when he was home in the off-season, as his star was rising in another sport - skateboarding, which he learned here at his local YMCA, and where he still practices today.

"Even though I'm not on my snowboard, I'm still doing the same motions and pumping and pushing and looking around where I want to do my airs and my tricks and it's definitely like a kind of cross training I guess," he explained.

It may have improved his snowboarding, but back in 1997, as his parents recalled, skateboarding nearly ended it all. White was 11 and performing at an exhibition with a skateboarder twice his age, and almost twice his size.

"Shaun lost his timing and came in and they just hit," Cathy White remembered. "Shaun was just limp he was out for quite a while."

"It was the scariest moment in my life. I thought we lost him," she added.

White suffered a fractured skull and broken bones and told his mother he wanted to call it quits.

"I think deep down, he was afraid. But I kept taking him to the Y," she recalled.

"You didn't lock him up in a room?" Simon asked.

"God, no," she replied.

"And I'm like 'I hate you' and I ended up learning a new trick because I stayed and it just exploded from there," White remembered.

The kid who says he was built for the board grew up to dominate two professional sports.

Far away from the snow, on the Southern California coast, he owns a house.

The spoils of victory - in this case medals and trophies - were literally everywhere; some are even stacked in his fireplace, since he says he ran out of space.

But the biggest win is his Olympic gold from 2006, especially because White came so close to not getting any medal at all.

"I fell in my qualifying run," he remembered. "And I was playing it pretty cool until my brother came up, like, 'You know what you just did?' Like you messed up big. You know, like, oh gosh."

"Is that what you said? 'Oh gosh'?" Simon asked.

"I probably uttered some things. I don't know, I think, in times where I'm really nervous, and I'm really under the pressure the worst possible outcome is for me to start thinking about it. I just do," White explained,

He delivered a clutch performance that has become his trademark and won the gold.

When awarded the medal, White was visibly moved. "It was just a heavy moment. I mean, your whole family's sitting there, and it's just like so overwhelming," he recalled.

He wasn't crying for long, as the money started pouring in and he went shopping.

On his list was a house and a sports car. He bought a Lamborghini, which he later crashed.

"I heard that you wrapped it around a tree," Simon remarked.

"There might have been a tree that went down in the neighborhood," White acknowledged, laughing.

He bought a second one and took Simon along for a spin.

"My mom's terrified of this car," White told Simon during the ride.

"Lamborghini is not a car that mothers like," Simon pointed out.

Maybe not, but his popularity with kids in America has attracted corporate America to Shaun White.

"You know, with a nickname like 'The Flying Tomato,' you could have ended up on a bottle of ketchup," Simon pointed out.

"Don't think I wasn't pitched!" White said. "It was a proposal."

Today, at 23, he is carefully building himself a business empire, and insists on a hands-on role in any deal he makes. He helped develop his very own best-selling video game, and designed a line of street wear for the mass retailer Target.

All together, White makes around $10 million a year. But his success hasn't always played well back in the half pipe.

"Some competitors who haven't achieved the fame and the fortune that you have, one of them said, 'He's just got his self and he's in his own world. And he's doing his thing. And we all have each other. It's really kind of sad,'" Simon remarked.

"I definitely found it a bit lonely sometimes. And I don't think you can have really good friends that you go and compete when with and you beat them at the hill in the competition, you're buddy buddy when you get down from the hill, I mean, I couldn't do it. I totally understand. I mean, if you and I were competing on the hill, I don't think I'd wanna hang out with you afterward while you're shining your medal or something. That would be a bummer," he replied.

White may be as fierce a competitor as there is going into the Olympics.

But you'd never know it by looking at him. What you'd see is a kid full of spunk and grace, enjoying the ride in the snow, and up in the air, soaring above it all.

"There's just this amazing moment where you're not going up anymore, but you're not coming down. It's just like this floating. And I've gotten comfortable enough to be able to look around. And it's like flying. You're just flying. Yeah, it's just the best feeling," he told Simon.

It's the world according to Shaun. "It's not bad. I come down once in a while. I try to stay up."

Produced by Tanya Simon and Andrew Metz