America at large/ George Kimball: If snowboarding can be an Olympic sport, is there any earthly reason why skateboarding and, for that matter, break-dancing shouldn't be included in the summer Olympics?

While the rest of the country has been basking in the afterglow of the United States' gold medal triumphs in the men's and women's snowboarding events at Salt Lake City, we've been wondering: If snowboarding can be an Olympic sport, is there any earthly reason why skateboarding and, for that matter, break-dancing shouldn't be included in the summer Olympics? If the Winter Olympics have traditionally consisted of an endless succession of stupid sports, we Americans seem to have outdone ourselves this time. Unable to beat the Nordic and Alpine worlds at their own games, we simply invent one we can win.

Take this snowboarding stuff. For some reason best known to Olympic administrators, the events themselves are called the "pipe" and "half-pipe" - particularly unfortunate appellations in that most of our medallists appeared in subsequent interviews to have been only recently weaned from a bong.

Give Danny Kass points for honesty, at any rate. Kass, who won the silver medal in the US sweep of the coveted half-pipe medals the other day, accurately described the perception of his sport in its pre-patriotic incarnation: "Dude," said Kass, "I guess the stereotype is that snowboarders are all a bunch of punks, doing drugs and getting out of control."

Danny also forthrightly admitted: "I'm just here for the beer and the babes." Why, if he keeps that up, Danny could become to American youth what George Hackl, the German luge ace (who, we are told, answers to the sobriquet "Speeding White Sausage") is to his Teutonic countrymen.

Prior to the introduction of snowboarding, we had always viewed the biathlon relay as the most preposterously conceived Winter Olympic event. Participants in this unique competition ski across a cross-country course, pausing intermittently to fire live ammunition (at targets, alas, and not at one another, which might make it more interesting) before giving way to the next member of the team. As we are on record as having pointed out before, to produce an equivalent event in the summer Olympics, one might have to devise a 4x400 meter relay in which each runner had to pause to open a can of soup before handing off to the next member of the team, although to bring that analogy up to date, the tin in question would have to be manufactured by Campbell's, the official soup of the XIX Winter Olympiad.

Listen, in any case, to Jay Hakkinen, who, despite his Finnish-sounding name happens to be America's top biathloner. (No US competitor has ever won a biathlon medal.) "We recognized eight years ago that we were pretty pathetic in biathlon," said Haakinen, who added that the determination of himself and his colleagues had been steeled by the events of September 11th.

"When it (the World Trade Centre attack) happened, I realised the Olympics skyrocketed in importance," Hakkinen explained last week. Huh?

If the present Games had not yielded a scandal, one suspects that the television folks would have invented one anyway, but fortunately for the ratings, the judges in the pairs skating event on Monday night managed to create an international incident of a "sport" contested to the strains of the theme from Love Story - and this time the Americans weren't even involved!.

The outrage wasn't so much that the Russian duo of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze beat Canada's Jamie Sale and David Pelletier to the gold medal, but that, with one exception, the scorecards of the international panel of judges broke down along Cold War-era party lines.

Judges representing the US, Germany, Japan, and (naturally) Canada favoured the Canadians, while those from Poland, China, the Ukraine, and (naturally) Russia scored it for the Russians. The swing vote belonged to French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne, and when she sided with Berezhnaya-Sikharulidze, there were charges that the whole thing was in the bag and that she had "traded" her vote for favourable consideration of a French couple entered in the ice-dancing competition which commences tomorrow.

Upon hearing the verdict, Sale broke into tears, which were immediately mopped up with Kleenex (the official tissue supplier of the XIX Winter Olympiad), and we found ourselves wondering whether Russian television commentators had similarly questioned the credentials of the snowboarding judges.

In the midst of the subsequent outrage, the only sensible reaction appears to have come from Pelletier himself. "If I didn't want this to happen to me," said the Canadian, "I would have just gone down the hill on skis."