Games vault once-fringe sport into mainstream success.

By Michael C. Lewis

| The Salt Lake Tribune

When the world’s best snowboarders arrived for the 2002 Salt Lake Games, they were still battling stereotypes, explaining their sport to outsiders and wondering how they would fit into the regimented world of the Olympics.

By the time they left, they were the next big thing.

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Ten years later, it’s fair to say that no other sport enjoyed a bigger boost from the Salt Lake Games than snowboarding. Its overwhelming popularity in just its second Olympics — particularly among American television viewers, many of whom were watching for the first time — helped push what had been mostly a rebellious fringe sport further into the mainstream and open important doors for its future as a major force in the sports world.

"We definitely helped grow the sport of snowboarding," said Ross Powers, the halfpipe gold medalist who now runs the snowboard program at the Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, "and — some would say it’s good, some would say it’s bad — helped it become more mainstream."

Certainly, snowboarding already had a substantial following by 2002.

That’s why the International Olympic Committee allowed the sport into the 1998 Nagano Games in Japan in the first place — practically begged it to join, in fact — in order to appeal to a younger audience and cultivate new fans who’d grown up watching the daredevil X Games and other increasingly popular action sports.

But when Powers and fellow Americans Danny Kass and J.J. Thomas swept the men’s halfpipe — then, one of only two snowboarding disciplines in the Olympics — on a brilliantly sunny day and home soil at the Park City Mountain Resort, the day after American Kelly Clark won the women’s event, the sport’s fate was sealed.

Ever more convinced of its decision, the IOC soon expanded snowboarding’s presence in the Olympics. The sport quickly became one of the pillars of NBC’s television coverage, and snowboarders once derided as pot-smoking slackers began to enjoy a legitimacy in the mainstream sports world that they never had before.

"That was really a monumental thing," said Seth Wescott, the two-time defending gold medalist in snowboardcross. "Because it was in the U.S. and we had that great success, we as athletes noticed all of the sudden that it was so much more in the public eye. It was hugely instrumental that way."

Wescott should know.

Without snowboarding’s success in 2002, his discipline — snowboardcross — might never have been added to the Olympics. But it made its debut at the 2006 Turin Games in Italy, and the IOC has approved slopestyle for the 2014 Sochi Games in Russia.

"Definitely, I believe it has the same future as the beginning of snowboarding in Nagano in 1998," IOC president Jacques Rogge said in announcing slopestyle’s approval last year. "You see what has happened in between."

Television ratings for snowboarding have gone through the roof — one broadcast on NBC attracted 30 million viewers and beat "American Idol" during the 2010 Vancouver Games — and superstars such as Shaun White have emerged on the strength of their combination of independent vibe and Olympic cachet, crossing over to mainstream appeal in a way that would not have been possible just a few years before.

White is by far the biggest name in snowboarding, having won back-to-back Olympic halfpipe gold medals as well as countless other titles in both skateboarding and snowboarding at the X Games, the Winter X Games and the Dew Tour.

"I was too young to see it then," said snowboardcross Olympian Faye Gulini, who was in fourth grade during the 2002 Olympics. "But that was definitely a big step in snowboarding. You talk about snowboarding, and everyone knows Shaun White and everyone knows Kelly Clark, and it’s all from that. It started there, and now they’re just super-famous and everyone thinks of them when they think of snowboarding."

The marriage isn’t perfect, though.

Some snowboaders still chafe under IOC management, a dozen years after Norway’s Terie Hakonsen famously boycotted the Nagano Games to protest the decision to have the International Ski Federation administer the sport, rather than a snowboarding federation.

Just last year, in fact, the issue arose again after slopestyle was admitted to the Sochi Games, when the International Ski Federation mandated that riders would have to qualify for the Olympics by competing on its own fledgling circuit, rather than through the long-established top tour events such as Ticket to Ride, Winter X Games and the Dew Tour.

Overall, though, both sides have benefitted.