Mike Celizic

BARDONECCHIA, Italy - With the United States and winter sports, the motto is not, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” It’s “If you can’t beat ‘em at their sports, invent your own sports.”

Team USA was fourth in the medal count on Friday with 10 medals. And more than half of those — six — have been contributed by the newest made-in-America Olympic sport — snowboarding.

This happens to be one better than the contribution of the snowboarding team to the U.S. medal haul in Salt Lake City, helped by the addition of the snowboardcross in Turin.

Seth Wescott is the latest American slacker to become Today Show material after winning the men’s snowboardcross — NASCAR on Ice, folks like to call it — on Thursday. Lindsey Jacobellis botched a chance at gold in the women's snowboardcross on Friday, but was still so far ahead that she easily added to the U.S. total with a silver medal despite falling.

The other medalists are Shaun “The Flying Tomato” White, who won gold in the halfpipe to go with Danny Kass’ second silver in two Olympics, and the women’s gold and silver medalists, Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler. They’re all kids you probably didn’t know existed two weeks ago, but now look at as shining examples of what’s right with America’s youth.

Perceptions can change
It’s quite a turnaround for snowboarding and snowboarders, a change in perception and fortunes that only the Olympics could pull off.

It wasn’t that long ago — 10 years or less — that respectable ski areas didn’t want snowboarders on their mountains. The practitioners of this new art were frighteningly young, wore dilapidated and voluminous clothing that hung halfway down their skinny backsides, listened to cacophonous noise that they insisted on calling music and in general scared the lift tickets out of the grown-ups.

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The kids liked the image. That was the whole point of what they were doing — to have fun on the slopes without looking and acting like their parents. And as their numbers grew, savvy ski resort operators began building special runs just for them.

ESPN, which has never seen a sport, from log-rolling to Australian rules football to darts, that it couldn’t televise, saw a potential gold mine in these kids and invented the Winter X Games just for them.

The International Olympic Committee is full up on summer sports. So most of the entertainment of the Summer X Games have yet to make the Olympic menu. But the Winter Games are a different animal. They take up the same amount of time as the Summer Games — 17 days — but there was a decided dearth of events with which to fill all those hours. There was also a need to draw young fans into the circle of the Olympic rings.

Two decades ago, freestyle skiing made its way into the games under similar circumstances, and that sport has also served the United States well in the medal totals. In fact, if the freestyle skiers had met expectations this year, the stars and stripes would be challenging Norway for first place today.

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Before there was snowboarding and freestyle skiing, America was only slightly better at winter sports than Great Britain is at any sport. Team USA would get its figure skating medal or three every four years, and there’d always be a speed skater or two to win a few more. Sometimes skiing would produce a couple. If the Games ended with a dozen medals in America’s bank, they were considered a success.

Home-snow advantage
Then came Salt Lake City, home-snow advantage and the snowboarders. Team USA won 34 medals that year, 21 more than it had four years earlier in Nagano. Five of them came from the snowboard team and three more from freestyle skiers for eight in all — 24 percent of the nation’s total.

The freestylers haven’t held up their end, pretty much like so many others on the U.S. team from Bode Miller to doubles lugers who have crashed and burned under the pressure of the Olympics.

But the snowboarders – those slackers that so many skiers cursed for their lack of discipline and industry – have been gold in the bank. The higher the expectations for them, the better they’ve performed.

They’re tougher than the grown-ups ever thought they were, and, when they’ve won, they’ve been as proud – and as dewy-eyed – at being American champions as anyone who’s ever stood on a podium has ever been.

We couldn’t beat the world at their games, so we invented our own. So the next time you see some kids dressed in a way that even snowboarders think is weird doing something you’ve never seen before, don’t sneer at them. They just might be our next Olympic champions – just as soon as we get whatever it is they do in the Games.

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