Trevor Jacob, the next Shaun Palmer

ByALYSSA ROENIGK
February 17, 2014, 3:01 AM

— -- SOCHI, Russia -- Trevor Jacob is a quitter. And that, as much as his preternatural gliding ability, incredible air awareness and ability to navigate traffic while traveling 50 mph down a monster snowboardcross course, is why he just might become the youngest and least-experienced SBX racer to win Olympic gold during Monday's competition at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park.

Let me explain.

The first memory most folks in the snowboard industry have of Jacob, 20, is watching him compete in halfpipe or slopestyle and wondering, "Who is this kid?"

After moving with his parents from Malibu to Mammoth Lakes, Calif., at the age of 9, six years after he started snowboarding, Jacob entered his first slopestyle contest and won. At 13, he became the youngest halfpipe finalist ever at the U.S. Open of Snowboarding, an event with so much cachet that most of this year's Olympians will make the supreme effort to stumble out from beneath their Olympic hangovers to compete in it in March.

In Malibu, Jacob was a regular at the local surf breaks and skate parks, a talented surfer, skateboarder and BMXer who built a reputation on being the kid who would try anything, and was good at it all. But when he moved to Mammoth Lakes, snowboarding took over and the other sports began to take a backseat.

"I thought all the sports were so cool," says Jacob. "But when I got into snowboarding, the rest fell off."

That was partially Jacob's doing, and partially the result of coaches and sponsors steering him in the direction they believed was best for him. In the halfpipe, Jacob was considered to be "the next big thing." And for good reason: His talent and fearlessness were obvious. But major sponsors never materialized. And despite sporadic success, neither did elite contest results or X Games invitations.

"I never had many sponsors because they didn't know what to do with me," says Jacob. "People felt like they had to push me into one sport, but I have a true love for everything, so I decided not to focus just on one and kept progressing in everything."

That irked sponsors who knew Jacob had the ability to win consistently, were he to channel his energy into one sport. In 2010, feeling burned out on the freestyle world, he toyed with a few World Cup snowboardcross races.

As a member of the U.S. Snowboarding rookie halfpipe team, he was still finishing in the top five at Grand Prix and Dew Tour contests, and continued to until 2012, but he was no longer inspired to throw the same tricks on the same walls of the same halfpipes. He realized being the best halfpipe rider was never really his dream, anyway. And although slopestyle allowed for more creativity and expression than halfpipe, he wasn't feeling the passion there, either. So he walked away.