Winter Olympics/Snowboarding: Keith Duggan tries to blend in with the cool kids at Bardonecchia's snowboarding events
They gave the super cool snowboarding fraternity an Alp of their own. And yesterday, on the achingly beautiful outpost of Bardonecchia - where the backdrop looks like an Ansel Adams masterpiece - it was gold medal time. Curling may be grandmother's favourite winter Olympic sport, but snowboarding is where the Olympic hipsters hang out.
These are the children of the soul-destroyed X-generation: happy, sparklingly bright, confident youngsters who talk in 1960s surf slang and surround themselves with the latest sounds and gizmos.
Yesterday, at the women's half-pipe gold medal event, the day belonged to the American teenager Hannah Teter, born into a snowboarding dynasty and nursed on the snowy highs of Vermont.
Although a perfect Stars and Stripes day was denied when a Norwegian girl, Kjersti Buaas, rudely prevented an American sweep by edging reigning champion Kelly Clark out of third place, Teter put on something of a show. She gave such a stunning exhibition in her first run that by the time she was scheduled for her final ride down the wide, icy funnel on which the boarders perform twists and flips, gold was already hers.
Or, as she explained herself: "I was, like, standing there and Gretchen was there and I just flew down soooo hard and dropped in. And I was, like, step it up, step it up, and then my coach was, like, victory lap! And I was, like, no way! And I just wanted to go out there and, like, do it for the family. It's the syrup! It's the syrup!"
There were several folks listening in who looked as though they might have been hippies back when Hendrix was alive and kicking, and even they stared in puzzlement as the Olympic champion beamed at them. Meantime, the gentleman from the Times of London simply demanded her remarks be translated in to English.
But if Teter's comments sounded mixed-up, that's as it should be. Snowboarding is one of those hybrid affairs, born out of surfing idealism, human imagination and proximity to snow. Only in the last decade has it strayed from its cult origins, and now, borrowing from the tone set by the X (Extreme) Games, the IOC bend over backwards to appear cutting edge, blasting out the Foo Fighters and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit so that the whole event felt like an MTV product.
Somehow, it is doubtful that poor old Kurt Cobain had shining snowboarders in mind back when he penned his messed-up classic. But to these kids, Cobain is 12th century history. Music, though, is at the heart of snowboarding. While most athletes warm up by stretching or skating, snowboarders engage in some iPod adjusting. Indeed, silver medallist Gretchen Blailer almost gave her coach heart failure when she began scrolling down her machine seconds before her final run.
"It is very important," she said. "Napster is actually one of my sponsors and music can either relax you or pump you up, and I had a song I wanted, Holiday by Green Day. That's the song that got me going all week."
Music and gadgetry is not snowboarding's only distinguishing features. Alone among sports, snowboarding didn't even have to apply to become an Olympic sport. Seduced by the sport's combination of hip, youth appeal, soaring popularity and commercial potential, the IOC cordially invited the extreme sport into its prestige family.
When the event made its debut in Nagano in 1998, Norway's Terje Hakonsen, then the king dude of snowboarding, boycotted the event, staying true to the boarder's hippy credo that the sport was not about competition or money. "Snowboarding is everything the Olympics isn't," he famously said.
His peers thought differently and declared riding in Japan was a radical idea. Their main worry was the IOC doping policy, which they feared would interfere with their downtime routine of listening to tunes and smoking weed. To ease their fears, Transworld Snowboarding, the bible of its kind, published reassurances that the IOC didn't even look for marijuana in its mandatory drugs test and that there was a greater chance of getting busted for drinking coffee.
As the IOC had hoped, snowboarding looked terrific on television and the first gold medallist, Canadian Ross Rebagliati, performed movingly at the press conference, dedicating his medal to his friend Lumpy Leidal, lost in an avalanche just weeks earlier. It was the perfect introduction.
Inevitably, Rebagliati tested positive for smoking grass and the IOC reluctantly announced that he would be stripped of his medal. Rebagliati claimed he hadn't touched a joint in months and that second-hand smoke had polluted his system when he attended his (presumably lively) going away party in Whistler. It was a great excuse, but one that the Japanese police, who interrogated poor Rebagliati in a slammer in downtown Nagano, were not buying.
He was still in the midst of questioning when, after hurried negotiations between the IOC, the ski federation and CAS, it was announced that marijuana merely qualified as a restricted substance in this instance. It was declared that Rebagliatti would get his medal back, although he never relinquished it. He kept the gold in his pocket during the entire ordeal and it was still there when he left the Nagano police station, probably to get very, very stoned.
Since those early days, Olympic snowboarding has made apocalyptic strides, and Shaun White, who won gold for the US men in the half-pipe on Sunday, may become a future summer Olympian if skateboarding is drafted on to the schedule because of its youth appeal.
"I was stoked," White, originally a skateboarder, said on winning gold. "I was pulling for my team-mate Danny (Kaas) and was amped for Mason (Aguirre). And Andy (Finch) is riding hurt but that guy is gnarly." Quite.
We will know that snowboarding truly rules if, at the closing ceremony, IOC president Jacque Rogge declares the Torino event as, "like, the gnarliest Olympics ever, dude".
