An Olympic gold medal doesn't come with an instruction manual, a tube of metal polish or even a box. Shaun White, nineteen-year-old snowboarder champion, earned his golden medallion with a bravura performance on an Italian halfpipe. Now he's trying to figure out: What do you do with the damn thing?

He expounds on some of the possibilities. He could never take it off, eventually developing a medal-shaped tan line on his chest. He could use it as a backstage pass for everything in life: If a waitress ever hesitated to add eggs to his breakfast order, he could whip out the medal. Then the impressed waitress, White explains, would say, "I'll see what I can do." But one option seems strongest. With a crooked grin, White says, "I could hang it from the rearview mirror of my car."

White is cool enough to enjoy the notion of bringing home a medal smeared with grape jelly and bread crumbs -- but not so cool that he was able to hold back the tears at the medal ceremony. ("I wasn't crying, dude," he insists. "I had some tears come out," he explains, making a distinction so subtle as to be nonexistent.) In his nineteen years of life on this planet, he's seen snowboarding evolve from outlaw sport to extreme-athletics juggernaut. Not long ago, it seemed like an awkward, pandering idea for the Olympics to have snowboarders at all. Now snowboard events are a highlight of the schedule.

Snowboarding, once a good way to get ejected from ski resorts, has gone mainstream. In no small part, that's because of White's shaggy charm and the amazing feats of twisting airborne ballet he can perform with a plank of wood strapped to his feet.

White is a master of the 1080, meaning he can do three full rotations of 360 degrees after launching himself into the air. He concedes that "1080s are cool, but they're not that fun to do. They're hard and pretty technical. What's most fun for me is really big jumps and long, slow spins." That's not how one wins professional events, but it's what the sport is really about for White. He says, "I can have fun if there's a little snow bump, and me and my friends, we're just trying back flips and landing on our heads, you know what I mean? Honestly, I think that the way to become the best is just to have fun."

When White walks into a room, he barely seems to be expending any energy at all. His gait is halfway between a graceful professional athlete's and a slouching teenager's. (Even standing up straight, he's only five foot eight and around 140 pounds.) But when he thinks something's funny -- an episode of Family Guy, or his brother, Jesse, clowning around with an oversize cowboy hat -- he jerks to life like there's an electrical current running through his veins.

There are other snowboarders who can do more elaborate stunts than White: Some of the Europeans can spin like dervishes, landing 1260s or even 1440s, but you can practically see the beads of sweat flying off them when they do the trick. White says, "I've got friends who do tricks, and when they make it look easy, that's the hardest. I think that's good style: to be able to perform your tricks at a pristine level and make it look good. You might watch and say, 'Oh, he isn't doing much' -- but that's when you're doing really well." White is talking about his friends, but he's describing himself. His effortless style is what makes him so appealing: On the halfpipe, he looks like a relaxed weekend rider who somehow stumbled into doing one astonishing trick after another.

"Even five years ago, I thought Shaun was one of the most amazing athletes on the planet," says skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. "I first saw him snowboarding when he was about nine, and he was just this little pixie with a giant helmet, coming down the halfpipe. Now, he's grown into his own style -- plus he can do tricks five feet higher than everyone else does them."

White is fair-skinned and freckled, and he hides behind an enormous mop of dark-red hair. That hair gave him one of his nicknames: the Flying Tomato. He used to embrace it, even wearing headbands with a flying-tomato logo, but he has grown tired of it. Other nicknames he has had: Future Boy (from when he was a prepubescent prodigy, pegged as the future of the sport), the Egg (for how his skull looks with a helmet on top), Senor Blanco (Spanish).