He Had Two Open-Heart Surgeries Before His First Birthday. Then He Became the Most Decorated Athlete in X Games History.

Before Shaun White turned one year old, he'd already had two open-heart surgeries. He was born with tetralogy of Fallot — sometimes called blue-baby syndrome — a congenital heart defect serious enough that elite athletic competition wasn't exactly the expected outcome for the kid who survived it.

He just turned 40. He's also the most decorated athlete in X Games history.

White is a three-time Olympic gold medalist in half-pipe snowboarding, winning in 2006, 2010, and 2018. He holds 15 X Games gold medals — an all-time record — and he's the only athlete to ever compete in both the Winter and Summer X Games, adding skateboarding titles to his snowboarding dominance. He made his Winter X Games debut in 2000 and kept winning across two decades: five slopestyle titles between 2003 and 2009, superpipe titles in 2003, 2006, and every year from 2008 to 2013.

The heart condition isn't a footnote to the career — it's the part of the story that makes the medal count strange rather than simply impressive. Tetralogy of Fallot restricts blood flow to the lungs; kids who have it are often visibly out of breath from ordinary activity before surgery corrects it, and even after correction, competitive endurance sport isn't a guaranteed outcome. White didn't just recover from it. He built one of the most physically demanding careers in professional sports on top of it.

White retired from competitive snowboarding in 2022. These days his attention is on Whitespace, his snowboarding and lifestyle brand, and on using his own story — heart condition included — as something worth sharing publicly rather than a private medical footnote.

Turning 40 is, for most people, just a birthday. For an athlete whose first year of life included two surgeries most infants never need, it's also a number that wasn't guaranteed.