Winter Olympics/Freestyle skiing: Dale Begg-Smith is the gold medal Canada lost. And given Canada's luck, they might have thrown away the next Bill Gates in the process.
If there was a doubt that the Olympics is the maddest of circuses, it was answered at last night's freestyle skiing final, where a 21-year-old Maple Leaf native won a gold medal for Australia and spent the next hour denying he had made tens of millions of dollars from his internet company.
The moguls event in the freestyle attracted the most boisterous and engaged crowd of these games. A 20-second rush down a steep slope with hundreds of rivets, the course features two impressive aerial jumps and a hard sprint to the finish. Like the other young sports, it is hugely popular, a perfect mixture of speed, colour and brevity for a generation who perhaps do not have the attention span required for those marathon, minute-plus downhill races. It is undeniably an adrenaline kick, and also seems to specialise in competitors whose life stories are more outlandish than the overhead spins and helicopter twirls they attempt for thrills.
Begg-Smith is 21. He lives in Melbourne, but keeps a pad in Vancouver and regularly hangs in Japan and "Europe" also. He reportedly drives a Lamborghini, but would admit only to a Ford last night.
He doesn't market his image or his reputation as the world's best moguls skier. He doesn't need to. When he was 13, Begg-Smith founded an internet company with his brother in the hope of making a few bucks, and has reputedly earned many, many millions since.
"It is complicated," he said frostily last night when pressed for details on his business empire.
"Basically, we have technology for companies to monitor their own advertisements and to track how they are doing. But it is nowhere near as big a deal as people have been making it out to be."
Spike-haired, slender and frighteningly composed, the Canadian/Australian was so blasé about his business project that he claimed not to be able to remember what it's called.
"That was a long time ago," he said. (As in the early 00s.)
"AdsCPM Network has been mentioned. Would that be right?"
"Ummmh. Not really," he sighed. "We had that as a domain mask for a while. But I'm not doing much with it at the moment. And look, I don't know why we are talking about the company again. I have just won Olympic gold and I'm not here to talk about business."
Begg-Smith started out training with his native Canada, but was "too busy with school and work and stuff" to make the training camps. So he moved to Australia, as you do, and resumed his moguls career.
There is no doubt young Begg-Smith fairly smoked the old moguls course fairly smartly last night, but the one question which must have been on everyone's mind was: what in God's name is going on here? Why was this lad founding companies when he was 14? Why wasn't he doing the dishes or watching The Simpsons? Where were his folks?
Astonishingly, though, Begg-Smith's life has been fairly boring in comparison to the bronze medallist, American Toby Dawson. Back in 1978, police in Pusan, South Korea, came across an abandoned baby on their doorstep. Three years later, Toby was adopted by the Dawsons, grew up in Colorado, starred in some movies and acquired the nickname "Awesome Dawson".
Such is the power of Olympic broadcasting that the notion of his birth parents recognising their baby zooming down the Italian Alps in tinted goggles and a Team USA snowsuit has crossed his mind.
"Of course, yeah, I have been thinking about that issue," he said last night. "And already, there have been phone calls from people claiming to be my birth parents. I dunno. I'm just taking this process very slowly and we'll see what happens."
Bronze was a nice response to Dawson, who travelled to Torino very much in the shadow of his team-mate, Jeremy Bloom, the poster-boy of the sport. As well as being top dog on the mogul course, Bloom is regularly listed in all the fashion and celebrity magazines as one of America's 50 Most Beautiful. He models in his spare time - of which there isn't much, because he is also one of the best football players in the States. In fact, when he returns from Turin, he is likely to quit freestyle skiing and pursue a lucrative NFL career as a wide receiver, where grunting, jealous, anonymous linebackers will try to destroy his movie star looks but won't be able to because he will be too fast, too fly, too Jeremy.
His performance in Jovenceaux, lit with arclights and atmospheric against the blue, cloudy backdrop of the Alps, was good enough to earn him fourth, a disappointment he accepted with a philosophical and sporting shake of his handsome head. Jeremy in defeat mode broke a thousand hearts in the stands at Jovenceaux and launched a thousand camera flashes.
The silver medallist, incidentally, was a Finnish lad called Mikko Ronkainen, a pleasant, averagely handsome sportsman who was brought up in a normal household, lives in just one country and has no mysterious and endlessly profitable business portfolios. All he claims to be good at is mogul skiing.
What a loser.
