Mike Celizic

TURIN, Italy - It was created by rebel kids who wanted something to call their own, something with no rules and no judges and no adults to tell them what they were doing wrong. So it’s more than ironic that snowboarding is one of the hottest sports in the Winter Olympics.

The Olympics, after all, are precisely where the pioneers who started snowboarding didn’t want to be. The Olympics were where those adults with their rules were, where freedom was replaced by point systems and required moves and degrees of difficulty, where something that should be a work of athletic art is reduced to numbers and scores.

Imagine Picasso being judged on the basis of brush strokes, use of color and fidelity to form. “Guernica” never would have made the cut.

That’s why a lot of snowboarders originally wanted no part of the Olympics. They had the Winter X Games, ESPN’s creation, where they could do what they wanted and where the atmosphere was young, loud and hip. Why did they need the Olympics?

That’s what one of the world’s leading riders, Norway’s Terje Haakonsen, thought when the first Olympic snowboard competition was held at the 1998 Nagano Games. Rather than submit his act to the scrutiny of tight-sphinctered judges, Haakonsen skipped the party.

His fans applauded his commitment to individual freedom. Unfortunately, the world at large barely knows who he is. You don’t see that today, when the top boarders might skip the X Games to get ready for the Olympics, but not the other way around.

Most sports clamor to be in the Olympics, the world’s biggest athletic stage. Win a world championship in curling or badminton or table tennis, and few outside of your hometown and your sport either know or care. Win an Olympic gold medal in those sports, and you’re a hero for life.

“The whole thing about the Olympics is people barely care what sport you did,” says Jonny Moseley, who won a gold in 1998 in a related discipline – freestyle moguls skiing. “The Olympics are so big. The X games are just a blip in comparison.”

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Win the Olympics and you pick up a new first name. You’re no longer Jonny Moseley, you’re Olympic Gold Medalist Jonny Moseley. There’s a magic to the Olympic brand that you can’t get anywhere else. It was like that for the Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. It remains that way today.

So if your sport is in the Olympics, it has an aura that even ESPN can’t produce. And if it’s not in, it’s second-rate.

And if you’re sport is hot, the Olympics will come knocking. “They just snap up sports from the X Games,” Moseley says.

That’s why snowboarding is in the Games — the Olympics needed them. There’s nothing more dangerous in this world than appearing to be old and stodgy, and the International Olympic Committee knows it. And the Winter Games especially needed more sports and new blood to drive the ratings — and the income. What better way to do that than to embrace the sport that kids around the world were flocking to in droves?

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And, it turned out, snowboarding needed the Olympics because nothing is more validating to a sport than being in the Games, and no prize in sports is more revered than an Olympic gold medal. Get in the Olympics and the sport spreads, equipment manufacturers prosper and slacker kids get rich.

At least that’s what should happen to Shaun White after Sunday. He won the men's halfpipe, the aerial thrill show that has a 450-foot long trough with 21-foot walls upon which boarders launch 20 feet or more in the air, and they spin, twist and tumble in ways that don’t seem possible.

If you’re of that age at which everything kids do and like seems terribly confusing and more than a little worrisome, you might want to turn off the sound on your TV. That way you won’t be thrown off by the color commentators, who tend to scream rather than talk and employ a language full of words you’ve never heard before. Besides, the tricks don’t need commentary to be impressive.

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