Career jump-start

When Hannah Teter was just a tyke, brothers Abe and Elijah bounced her from a trampoline 15 feet into the air and onto the roof of their parents’ car.

Splat!

They expected her to run crying into the house. Instead, she climbed down from the car and jumped back onto the trampoline.

They knew then that she was one tough little girl.

But what all four of her older brothers and her parents could not have known was that this little girl from backwoods Vermont would blossom into one of the world’s top snowboarders and soar to Olympic stardom.

Or that she would then credit them for her success.

Or that she would use her rising celebrity to bring relief to the poor in Africa, insisting that this was what inspired her to do well at the Turin Games in February.

“At a young age, I had that compassion,” she said.

Toss in the “ridiculously cool monks” she conferred with as a child, and the family’s homemade maple syrup, and you have the key components of the Hannah Teter story.

That story resumes tonight on Aspen’s Buttermilk Mountain. On the eve of her 20th birthday, Teter will compete in the ESPN X Games halfpipe competition against many of the athletes she defeated at Turin.

It’ll be her first event since the Olympics and since knee surgery in April. And if she can somehow shake the rust and beat them again, she says she’ll donate the $20,000 top prize to charity.

Odds don’t favor the gregarious blond from Belmont, Vt., but she has something else working strongly in her favor.

She calls it “positivity.”

How, for example, was Teter able to win the Olympic gold medal despite a chipped bone in her knee -- which had kept her out of the X Games two weeks earlier -- and the entire world looking on?

“I just asked for positivity before I went there,” she said, “and to be happy and grateful and stoked for everybody, and it just ended up being so much fun.”

She’d also thought it was fun being spun in a saucer across one of Belmont’s frozen ponds by her brothers. Or leaping out of the upstairs window onto the trampoline, as they did. Or flinging herself, as they did, off the family snowboard ramp.

Winning Olympic gold was, rather, the result of hard work and determination, and it elevated Teter to heights she never could have imagined.

“I was going from being in my own space -- just snowboarding and listening to my music -- to all of a sudden being raced down to Torino in a cop car with sirens,” Teter said. “It was a trip.”

Her post-Turin whirlwind trip included visits with David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, MTV and, of all people, Martha Stewart -- they made granola.

Teter also made the cover of Sports Illustrated. She and Gretchen Bleiler, the Olympic halfpipe silver medalist from Aspen, waved the green flag to start the Daytona 500.

Teter, selected by ESPN as best female action sports athlete, saw her salary with Burton Snowboards increased into the mid-six figures. She also was rewarded by sponsors Mountain Dew and Motorola.

She and her mother, Pat, launched Hannah’s Gold, maple syrup produced in the family tradition, with proceeds of each $15 bottle earmarked for charity.

“For being only 19, her head’s pretty firmly planted,” said Amen Teter, 29, the oldest brother and Hannah’s agent. “I’m pretty amazed.”

Amen, Abe, Elijah and Josh were Teter’s inspiration, in part, because they were often her most accessible friends.

Belmont is minuscule, even by small-town standards, with fewer than 500 inhabitants, and the Teters lived on 10 acres up a mountain road beyond Belmont proper.

“She was a tomboy, this rag-tag girl always tagging along,” Amen said. “But we never treated her like a princess girl -- poor her. She was just a cool sis doing cool stuff with us.”

Teter’s parents, Pat and Jeff, were essentially hippies. They and the monks at a neighboring monastery preached positivity -- or some form thereof -- as gospel.

“Now I’m all about praying and sending positive energy to people who need it,” Teter said.

Her fondest memories, though, are of the long days each spring when the family bounced through the forest in an old pickup and used buckets to collect sap from maple trees. Jeff Teter would then boil the sap down to syrup.

It took nearly 100 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

“Boiled-down goodness,” the family assures. Poured on pancakes, a perfect send-off for a romp in the snow.

Abe and Elijah were competition junkies and pro snowboarders partially sponsored by Burton, which would ultimately land Hannah as its female poster child.

She followed their lead, turned pro at 16, and left them in her tracks. She finished that 2003 season ranked second on the Grand Prix circuit and by the World Snowboarding Federation. She was victorious at a World Cup race in Chile and claimed the Vans Triple Crown at Breckenridge, Colo.

In 2004, she won the Grand Prix title and struck gold in the X Games halfpipe competition. Last winter, during Olympic qualifying on the Grand Prix circuit, she finished second to Bleiler.

The pressure of the Olympics was like mounting snow on a sagging roof. So, before the halfpipe final, on a brilliant afternoon at Bardonecchia in the Italian Alps, they went free riding together to loosen up.

They got lost and had to ride through a closed portion of mountain to make it down in time for the competition. Snowboarders being rebellious -- the mainstream media ran with it.

The two arrived just in time for the start and finished first and second, Teter winning on the merits of a flawless run that included a front-side 540, successive huge board-grab aerials, a front-side 900 and a Cab 540.

She says she will unveil a 1080 at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

“Now, it all seems like one big dream, for sure,” she said of a year blown by without any serious snow time.

Hannah’s Gold, sold on a website of the same name, has raised nearly $10,000 for the Christian relief organization, World Vision.

The snowboarder is forging ahead with plans to sponsor a village in Kenya, helping to build a medical clinic and bringing in clean water.

The United States Olympic Committee last week honored her as the 2006 sportswoman of the year, in part because of her humanitarian efforts.

Teter has also been busy fulfilling sponsor obligations. She has made drawings for Mountain Dew, to be used as computer screen savers.

She’s assisting Motorola and Burton in the design of a jacket wired with speakers and microphones for listening to music and talking on the phone.

The family managed to squeeze in a long vacation to a remote surfing village in Costa Rica, where Hannah and Abe each bought a beachfront lot.

Teter is concerned, though, that global warming may flood her property before she can build on it. In fact, it’s something she has begun to think about often.

“You were talking about the next Olympics and I was thinking, ‘If they’re even going to have it,’ ” she said to her interviewer.

Perhaps with enough positivity, comes the reply that people can stem the tide.

To which the snowboarder concluded, “It’s scary, dude.”

pete.thomas@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

X Games 11 update

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Hundreds of athletes and thousands of rowdy fans have descended upon Aspen, Colo., an otherwise quiet Alpine community, for X Games 11, which are scheduled to run today through Sunday on Buttermilk Mountain.

The older folks may even recognize some of the athletes, having watched them save the U.S. Olympic team from what, without them, would have been an embarrassing showing in February in Italy:

Shaun White (gold medal), Hannah Teter (gold medal), Seth Wescott (gold medal), Aspen’s own Gretchen Bleiler (silver medal) and Lindsey Jacobellis (silver medal).

“Lucky Lindsey” has been in high demand as the X Games drew closer, but about all reporters have wanted to talk to her about was the way she let her gold-medal hopes slip away -- by showboating off a jump with a huge lead near the finish line, catching an edge upon landing and tumbling through the snow as Switzerland’s Tanja Frieden zoomed by to win the gold.

What has Jacobellis done since winning silver at the Olympics? The same as before: dominate.

The amiable but fiercely competitive snowboarder from Stratton, Vt., heads into Saturday’s Boarder-X final having recently defended her 2005 world title, and won the first two events of the 2006-07 Jeep King of the Mountain series.

“It wasn’t anything to dwell on,” she said of her Olympic misstep. “If that was the worst thing to happen to me, then I’m pretty lucky. It was a mistake, but whatever.”

Hence her new nickname: Pretty Lucky Lindsey.

Watch out below!

The three snowboarding disciplines may be the marquee events, and White may reign supreme as he prepares to defend his X Games superpipe gold and goes for a fifth consecutive X Games slopestyle victory.

But snowboarding may not necessarily be the top draw. In fact, a new event has been added that lends high-powered drama and danger to these X Games.

Snowmobile freestyle, which replaces Moto X, promises to grab and hold both live and TV audiences -- the X Games are airing on ESPN and Channel 7 -- when the final is held during prime time Sunday evening.

Ten snowmobilers will take individual runs with their 500-pound machines on a course that includes jumps from 45 to 100 feet. Some may do back flips. Some might also require a trip to Aspen Valley Hospital. They’ll be scored on the difficulty and execution of their routines.

As star snowmobiler Chris Burandt told the Rocky Mountain News: “I expect it to be a huckfest with a lot of wrecks.”

Olympic connection

There are also three skiing disciplines -- superpipe, slopestyle and skier-X. The latter event, also known as skier-cross, will debut as an Olympic sport in 2010 in Vancouver.

That’s further proof -- after the addition of snowboarding superpipe and snowboarder-cross -- that the Olympic Committee and Olympic networks are mindful that tradition (read curling and biathlon) can carry the Winter Games only so far.

Daron Rahlves, a former Olympian and star on the World Cup Circuit, will make his X Games debut in skier-cross. The final is Sunday afternoon.

Fresh face

The up-and-comers are too numerous to list, but snowboarder Jamie Anderson stands out as the most likely podium candidate.

Last year, at 15, she replaced White as the youngest athlete to win an X Games medal.

“Jammin’ Jamie,” from South Lake Tahoe, claimed bronze in the snowboard slopestyle competition and this year will again compete in all three snowboarding disciplines.

White was only a few days older when he was a silver medalist in slopestyle and superpipe in 2002.

Money matters

Prize money for this year’s X Games is $726,100, with a top individual purse of $20,000.

-- PETE THOMAS