updated 8:08 p.m. ET Feb. 19, 2006

TURIN, Italy - The image of snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis hot-dogging her way out of a certain gold medal became the jaw-dropping, head-shaking, rubbing-your-eyes-in-disbelief moment of the Turin Games.

Sports columnists, television analysts and pretty much anyone over 40 were mortified. Seth Wescott, age 29 and the men’s gold medalist in the snowboard cross, was thrilled.

Not so much by his teammate’s brain lock just two hills from her own win in the event’s Olympic debut. But he understood Jacobellis’ excitement in the seconds before she opted to show off rather than show up at the finish line.

“It was good that she got carried away,” Wescott said Saturday in an appearance with silver medalist Jacobellis. “It would have been a shame if she didn’t.”

The 20-year-old Jacobellis, casual in a pair of jeans with her curly blonde hair pulled back, remained insistent that her backside method grab of the snowboard at the end of the race was not showboating.

“I was just having fun with the sport,” she said, hands crossed on her lap, politely answering the latest in an endless stream of questions about her Friday flub. “I got caught up in the moment, and stopped paying attention.”

Not necessarily a bad thing in the world of snowboarding.

The sport is about style and flair, as those who supported her on a variety of message boards pointed out.

“I can’t hate on her for it,” one post on snowboarding.com said. “I would have threw (sic) the method, too. I’m sure plenty of people here would have also. It was just really unfortunate that she landed funny and ate it. If she did that 100 times, she would probably have fallen once.”

In a snowboarding shop in Sauze d’Oulx, technician Greg Bell agreed.

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“What Lindsey did is fine. She tried to throw a bit of style into the jump. Unlucky she caught an edge on the landing,” said Bell, a Dublin native now living in Italy. “It’s mean-spirited to attack her for that. So she doesn’t get to take home the golden souvenir. She knows how well she did. She knows how well she could have run in that race. It’s sport. It’s not war. It’s not even a bad marriage.”

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Still, there were plenty of those who thought that by throwing her golden chance away, she put a chink in America’s dominance of the sport.

“She ruined the U.S.’s ownage of snowboarding,” another snowboarding.com posting said. “The U.S. had gold for every snowboarding event so far and she lost it when she had it. Hopefully, she isn’t the only one who learned from her huge and costly mistake.”

Rick Morrissey, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, spoke for the 40-and-over crowd.

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