ASPEN, Colo. — He is every bit as polished in a boardroom as he is on a snowboard — a meticulous caretaker of both his image off the snow and his reputation on it.

And yet, here’s what Shaun White had to say about his return to slopestyle at last year’s Winter X Games: “I don’t want to say I did the ‘human’ move. But I was like, ya know, if I go out there, I’m gonna get owned.”

He went out there, and, yes, it all went down exactly the way he expected.

Unprepared after taking two years off to focus on his Olympic halfpipe routine, the world’s most famous snowboarder looked like an impersonator wearing a red wig as he rode across those rails.

He finished 13th out of 16, didn’t qualify for finals and, by the end of a day that seemed to turn snowboarding on its head, White, of all people, was eliciting sympathy from those other riders who did, in fact, own him.

For a day at least.

That day marked Day 1 of the push to the Sochi Olympics, where slopestyle will make its debut, two years from now. One important stopping point on that road comes Friday, when White heads out for preliminaries of the 2012 X Games with a bag of new tricks.

He had a minor setback Thursday when he tweaked his already sore left ankle during a practice run and had to be treated by medical staff at the bottom of the mountain. But his publicist, Crystal Garrett, said it wasn’t serious, and White will be on the mountain today.

He doesn’t expect to get owned this time.

“I could have totally ducked out and waited until I had the moves to win the event, then come back and do it,” he said this week in an interview. “But I was like, ‘Ya know what, this is going to teach me a lot.’ Sometimes I think you do really need to lose. That felt like a true loss, and I respected it.”

It made him realize, he said, “I can’t compete with these guys. So I circled back, refocused on what I needed to do, looked at who won, what he did. I was able to build from there.”

If this story line sounds vaguely familiar, it should.

It was in 2010, the lead-up to the Vancouver Olympics, when White took what felt like a body blow by finishing second to Danny Davis in an Olympic qualifier. Within hours of that loss he was on the practice pipe, perfecting the Double McTwist 1260 — the jump that would separate him from the pack once again.

He didn’t even need it to win his second Olympic gold but put it out there during his second run — essentially a victory lap because he had already secured first place.

It’s not hyperbole to say that magic moment played a huge role in pushing the International Olympic Committee to add slopestyle and a few other “action sport” events to the program starting in 2014. Bottom line: One day of Shaun White at the Olympics isn’t enough.

He modestly accepts that notion.

“Slopestyle, it’s going to be a great event either way,” he said. “You could say the Olympics might need snowboarding more than snowboarding needed them. It’s give and take. But if I’m part of that, yeah, I’ll take it.”