Tricks of Her Trade

The halfpipe is a carved-out channel in the snow about the length of a football field, with walls about 10 feet high. This is what you do if you want to execute a maneuver called the Haaken flip:

Think visually now, because you’re going to be flying and spinning. You start by approaching a wall in the halfpipe backward. Then, at the lip of the halfpipe, you flip backward into the channel and spin 720 degrees. That’s two complete circles. You then land forward down in the pipe.

Got it?

If Shannon Dunn gets it during the women’s halfpipe event, odds are very good she will get the gold medal--because, to her knowledge, no other woman in the world has done it in competition.

“I love doing tricks that no one has tried before,” she says. “That’s what I thrive on.”

The maneuver is named after one of the kings of the halfpipe, Norway’s Terje Haakonsen--who doesn’t compete in the Olympics, considering them too corporate and thus bogus. Dunn loves the Games--”I’m stoked I’m going to the Olympics,” she says--and believes that if she can master the Haaken flip in the next couple of weeks, fans and judges “are going to freak.” She adds, “They’re going to be, ‘How did she pull that one off?’”

If it sounds farfetched to think that an Olympic-caliber athlete can learn a new move in only a few days, consider this: Dunn learned another exotic maneuver, called a McTwist, an inverted flip with a 540-degree rotation, just before the 1998 Nagano Games. She led the competition after the first round and won a bronze medal.

The experience then will help her now, she says: “I know what to expect--the anticipation of wanting to know what the Olympics are like. I’m just going to take [Salt Lake] as another great experience.”

At 29, Dunn is--at least on the snowboard tour--an old lady, so old that she’s known by some as “Shan-ma.” As in grandma.

“My goal always was to take really good care of my body so I could stay at a high level for a long time,” she says. “I’m really glad I stuck with it. There have been some hard times when I felt like quitting, when I felt I was getting too old for this. I knew if I would have stopped, though, I would have had a lot of regrets. I just pushed past it.”

Perhaps even more unusual by snowboarding standards, Dunn is married--her husband, Dave Downing, 33, is also an expert snowboarder. They split their time between Lake Tahoe in the winters and Encinitas, in northern San Diego County, in the summers.

“He’s like the oldest ripping guy,” Dunn says. “He’s an inspiration for a lot of people who have 9-to-5 jobs.”

So is Shannon. She was recently featured in one of the bibles of the attitude and lifestyle scene, Transworld Snowboarding: “I’m all about living in the moment,” she told the magazine.

Thus will it be in Salt Lake.

“I have no choice except to be confident going into the Olympics,” she says now. “You have to be in that mind frame. I have to just--I’m putting all my eggs in one basket. That’s what the Olympics is for: going for it. Going for gold, doing the best you can, having a great and awesome experience.

“I’m mentally just going for it. I think that’s more fun for me. I don’t want to be timid. I don’t want to go, ‘Oh, no, I don’t know if I can do it.’ I’m going to say, ‘I can do this.’ Because that’s what the Olympics is all about.”