Champion snowboarder, mountain biker and motorcycle racer Shaun Palmer has a little secret he'd like to share with you. Ready? "I think I'm the greatest athlete in the world," says Palmer, looking as thoughtful as possible for a guy with tattoos of Cadillac hood and dash ornaments festooning most of his muscular 5'9" physique. "Michael Jordan just had a basketball. I'm on a bike going down a mountainside. Or on a board flying over 60-foot cliffs. I know there are injuries in football, basketball and baseball, but it's not, like, death-defying."

Since dropping out of high school in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., at 16, the dirty-blond daredevil, now 30, has become the party-hardy poster boy of extreme sports. "He has extraordinary natural gifts, plus he's got guts," says Kevin Kinnear, founding editor of two snowboarding magazines. "Sometimes I think he's supernatural." And if five world snowboarding championships, a world mountain-biking title and top motocross finishes weren't enough, last month he turned the 1999 Winter X Games in Crested Butte, Colo., into a personal showcase. Entering an unprecedented four of the six events, he took home a snowboarding gold, and in Skiercross—vying against such outstanding racers as 1998 Olympic gold medalist Jonny Moseley—finished a surprising sixth.

"He's as tough a competitor as I've seen in any of the mainstream sports," says veteran sportswriter Sal Ruibal of USA Today. "But what puts him on top is his charisma, that sheer confidence and cockiness. You feel he's so on the edge that he can totally lose it at any time."

Riding that razor's edge is something Palmer has craved since childhood. "I always wanted to be a downhill ski racer," says Palmer, who has fond memories of watching Olympic skiers with his beloved maternal grandmother, Perky Neely. It was Perky who took care of young Shaun, an only child, while his single mother, Jana, worked a variety of odd jobs to make ends meet. "My dad left as soon as I was born," says Palmer of his father, Tim, then a "surf bum," now working construction in the San Diego area. "We kind of got to know each other when I was about 21, but I think he's a little late to be a real dad."

In any event, Tim Palmer wasn't there when Shaun got his first off-road motorbike at age 4. Though the youngster showed early talent in skiing and baseball, what really seized his imagination was the then-nascent sport of snowboarding. "I didn't watch tapes or study other guys—I just figured out what felt right," says Palmer, who made his first snowboard at 12.

"Whether it was on wheels or on a board, it had to be superfast—he had no fear," says Jana, 47, now a store security manager in Reno. "I remember once when he was 13, I had grounded him. Well, he jumped out of his second-floor bedroom window, got on his bike and took off. He was like that—always pushing the limits."

By 16, Palmer was pushing them successfully enough to win his first world snowboarding title. He was also hard at work on his bad-boy image, plunging with gusto into a boozing, pot-smoking party scene. Then, after the death of his grandmother Perky in 1992, the drinking began to get out of hand. Still competing but also performing as lead singer of a punk band called Fungus, the grieving Palmer started belting them down. "You can't be sober and play for a bunch of drunks," Palmer told USA Today's Ruibal last year. "You gotta get wasted, and I was the lead idiot."

Alcohol fueled sundry misadventures, including car wrecks, barroom brawls, even a naked bike ride down Mount Snow in Vermont. But the wild-man aura such scrapes created only increased Palmer's attractiveness as a pitchman for companies eager to reach his young male fans. "We got behind him because of our tradition of getting behind the most provocative athletes," says Bernie Bernthal, a marketing manager for Swatch, which sells a $60 Shaun Palmer watch. "And he's the rock and roll of snowboarding."

In recent years, Palmer has channeled more of his thirst for excitement into his racing career, adding new extreme sports to his repertoire. At January's Winter X Games he even entered the snowmobiling competition. "I'd driven a snowmobile about 20 times," says Palmer, who won a preliminary heat but fell short of making the finals. "But what the hell, I wanted to try."

Palmer, who earns an estimated $750,000 annually from race wins and endorsements for firms including Spy Optic, travels the competitive circuit on a $350,000, 40-foot chrome tour bus emblazoned with his name in foot-tall letters (designed to match the three-inch-high tattoo on his abs). Last May he moved into a five-bedroom home in Rubicon Bay, just 200 yards from the shore of Lake Tahoe. Looking out at the water from his wraparound deck consumes much of this single guy's downtime, but he still manages to cruise around Tahoe in one of his three Caddys (including a vintage '63 limo and a silver '61 convertible), listening to his favorite Frank Sinatra CDs.

Surprising? Well, Palmer says it won't be the first time he has been misjudged. "When I was in school doing the punk thing, skateboarding and snowboarding, a lot of people just wrote me off as a loser," he reflects. "They didn't understand how the whole thing evolved. I was heading for the stars, doing what I wanted to do. Still am."

Pam Lambert
Ron Arias in Big Bear, Calif.