DRESSED IN ALL black and topped off with a slime-green-and-black Monster Energy helmet, Palmer is easy to spot Saturday morning at the Jeep competition warm-up, trudging back up the mountain to the starting gate for his last practice run. The course snakes down the face like a vertical motocross track, with blind turns, huge rollers, whoop-de-dos, and not many banked turns.

"How do you feel?" I ask him with too much enthusiasm. He's ahead of the pack going into the race but still needs a strong weekend to win the overall series.

"Good," Palmer says, a forced smile cracking through his intense concentration. Not much interested in small talk at this juncture, he waves goodbye, then continues toward the top.

The next morning at around 10 A.M., I visit Palmer at his slopeside condo, where he's invited me to hang out. He looks disheveled, lying supine on the couch with his head in Cerasoli's lap. Most of the rest of the U.S. boardercross team—Pat Holland, 26, Jonathan Cheever, 23, Nick Baumgartner, 27, Alex Deibold, 22, and wax technician Andy Buckley, 38—are sitting around the living room, flashing one another a plastic hand with the middle finger sticking up (a treasure Palmer picked up at a truck stop) before going to breakfast.

Palmer looks worked over, even though he spent last night totally sober, "watching these guys get silly," he says, while they rode a mechanical bull at Dirty Little Roddy's, a bar in downtown Ketchum.

The guys and Cerasoli eventually clear out for breakfast, and Palmer, who's wearing a Rolling Stones hot-lips T-shirt, sits up. His blue eyes are boring straight through me, making me fumble with my tape recorder. Initially, the conversation goes like this:

ME: "What's up with you and Cadillacs?" [He has them tattooed all over his body.]

PALMER: "It's the standard of the world, hon. I used to ride my BMX bike around when I was about 12 and knew where every one in town was. I still have four."

ME: "Do your friends still call you Mini Shred?"

PALMER: "I was Mini Shred before Cheever was out of the womb. [Yelling to his teammate, who's returned to check e-mail on a laptop in the kitchen.] Right, Cheeves?"

CHEEVER: "Right, Grandpa."

ME: "So your life has been one long competition. Do you ever relax?"

PALMER: "My mind's always racing. Always. My mind's racing over the boards, the course, the sidecuts, the flex patterns. That's one thing people don't realize about me. They think, Oh, he's just crazy, he's tattooed, and he wins. But it's all calculation."

I dig deeper and ask about his mother. Jana told me that she and Palmer haven't been in touch for two years, mostly because, she said, her son has been too busy.

Palmer shuts me down, saying he prefers not to elaborate on his relationship with his mom. After reading plenty about his anger issues, which I haven't seen crop up yet, I ask, "Are you still as pissed off as everyone says you are?"

The blue eyes stare me down. "I still got a temper," he says. "Sometimes it's controllable, sometimes it's not. My heart's pumping to win, hon. You know, people say you need to learn how to lose, but I've always been scared of that, because if you learn how to lose, you're never going to care about winning enough to win. I'd rather win it. All of it."

"What's 'all of it'?"

"The finale of my whole career," he says. "The 2010 Olympics. I'm trying to keep my life going in a good direction to where I can stand on top of that podium and get higher than I would with any drug- or alcohol-induced high. I considered myself the king of the party, but I've graduated."

Since he's brought up drugs and alcohol, I ask him about Memorial Day weekend 2005. With that, I finally experience the Palmer wrath.

"I know all about the fucking OD because it's been said, and I know how people fucking write, and you want people to read that because they think it's exciting, but I just don't," he says. "I'm not scared to tell you what happened, but I don't want the article to be about fucking drugs. My mind is on Olympic gold."

After he calms down, Palmer tells me what happened that day.

"I got super-depressed because I wanted to race motocross, and my sponsorship money fell apart. I went down to this lake where all my buddies were partying and pretty much said, 'Fuck it,' because I didn't have any support. One thing led to another, and I ended up drinking way too much. Drinking's not the way to go when you're not doing good.

"Alcohol is a battle," he continues. "It's not that hard for me not to drink, but I don't understand alcoholism, and I'd like to get treated for it."

He pauses for a few minutes, gives me that terrifying deadpan stare, then smiles and says, "Whaddaya think? Shaun Palmer, Celebrity Rehab?"

"What are you going to do after you win your gold?" I ask.

"Live a normal life," he says.

"What's normal for Shaun Palmer?"

"My future after snowboarding is definitely going to be about building custom Cadillacs. I'd like to have 12 or 15," he says.

"What else?"

"Have kids! Be the best dad in the world!"