Culture Crash

Here’s the latest on those long-haired, baggy-trousered, navel-pierced skateboarders who scatter like geese when you blast the car horn in the grocery-store parking lot:

Some of them are Olympians.

Snowboarding, an icy offspring of skateboarding, makes its gnarly debut at the Nagano Games, so please welcome MTV’s “Kennedy” as she assists CBS Sports in spoon-feeding terms such as “goofy,” “fakie,” “shred Betty” and “stale fish” into the American lexicon.

The question: Is the world ready?

“I still get chased out of vacant parking lots,” said Todd Richards, a converted skateboarder who hopes to win gold for the United States in the halfpipe.

It would be nice to report the sport’s Olympic inclusion in two events, giant slalom and halfpipe (freestyle), has gone off without a hitch.

It would be nice to report the old-codger International Olympic Committee recognized snowboarding as the fastest-growing winter sport and worked arm in arm with Generation X in this communion.

Naturally, the opposite has transpired.

Snowboarding’s Olympic coming-out party has been rife with politics, outrage and dissension in what has become an epic culture clash.

Snowboarders, ultimate nonconformists, have butted boards with Big Brother, the IOC, and brother, it hasn’t been pretty.

Norway’s Terje Haakonsen, the world’s top halfpipe snowboarder, has already announced he is boycotting the Games in protest of the IOC, which he likened to organized crime.

“When I say Mafia, I mean what most people see in the word,” Haakonsen told a Swedish television station in December. “People who take over control but never let anyone have an inside look at what they are doing.”

Canada’s Mark Fawcett, a medal contender in the giant slalom and top snowboarding politico, also considered staying home but now says he will attend the Games to monitor firsthand the IOC’s actions.

At the heart of the controversy is just about everything: freedom of expression, control, respect, sponsors, the soul of the sport and a curious snowboarding mascot named “Animal.”

“It’s very complicated and it’s very emotional,” top giant slalom rider Lisa Kosglow said Wednesday from an Olympic qualifying race at Mammoth. “Most people want to hear about the Olympics, the Olympic spirit. They don’t want to hear that the Olympics are political, and that we are fighting this battle.”

Respect?

At Shiga Kogen, the site of the Olympic giant slalom, snowboarding is still prohibited. Racers will be allowed to use their boards on the course, of course, but then will be escorted off the hill.

“If you really want to [tick] me off, we can discuss that,” Kosglow said. “I’ll come out and say, ‘Screw those guys.’ ”

The mascot?

The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn. decided snowboarders needed their own Olympic mascot, so they enlisted the Jim Henson Co. to create the Muppet-ish “Animal,” described in a press release as “the maniacal, thrill-seeking, freedom-loving, monosyllabic raging id who marches to the beat of his own drum.”

The release also mentioned “Animal” would be for sale in various outlets.

Truth is, many snowboarders would like to take their boards and beat “Animal” to a fuzzy pulp.

Among the publishable opinions regarding the mascot, Kosglow offers: “I don’t like him as a representative for what snowboarding is.”

Expression?

Boarders are obsessed with freedom of choice, especially when it involves clothing. Says Richards: “It can ruin my day if my outfit isn’t aesthetically pleasing.”

More important, top snowboarders have their own clothing sponsors and resent having to wear Olympic uniforms bearing sponsors from competing companies. This evokes memories of the U.S. basketball Dream Team players covering up their uniform logos.

“The issue there is that riders have been supported by sponsors for years and years, and now they can’t represent their sponsors,” said Jason Girard, managing editor of TransWorld SNOWboarding magazine.

Richards was more emphatic: “These are the people who paid to get you where you are right now, yet you can’t wear their stuff at the Olympics? I consider that a bunch of bull.”

Control of the sport?

The mess started when the IOC announced in 1995 that snowboarding would be an Olympic sport in 1998 and ordered its subsidiary, the International Ski Federation (FIS) to work out the details.

Problem: Snowboarding already had its own sanctioning body, the well-entrenched International Snowboard Federation. The ISF resented very much that the FIS had been handed total control in the Olympic selection process, resulting in a fight similar to the governing-body war that plagued pro beach volleyball into the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

The ISF is a staunchly independent circuit in which riders are empowered to make decisions. Kowtowing to Olympic authority was counter to everything snowboarders had been fighting for since competing with skiers for slope space more than a decade ago.

“There’s a real theme there: ‘We don’t want to be like everybody else in this gig,’ ” Alan Ashley, vice president of athletics of the FIS-sanctioned USSA, explained of snowboarders. “The minute you’re in the Olympics, you’re captured in the system somehow. That goes all the way from IOC down to the USOC and the Amateur Sports Act.

“The selection system, all those types of things, aren’t really part of the culture. When you have to start fitting a culture that doesn’t believe in the system, you’re bound to have problems.”

The FIS started a snowboard tour to rival the ISF circuit. Battle lines were drawn and lawsuits were filed. ISF riders were not allowed to ride in FIS-sanctioned races, and vice versa.

After much legal wrangling, a three-event qualifying tournament, open to ISF and FIS riders, was established to determine the U.S. Olympic team.

Riders who decided to join the U.S. snowboard team were accused by some of selling out to the IOC.

Ross Powers, an Olympic hopeful in halfpipe, said he joined the U.S. team because it was the best avenue to the Olympics.

“The FIS is the Olympics, they know what’s going on,” Powers said this week.

Kosglow is an outsider, trying to make the U.S. team as an ISF rider.

She says she understands that some riders joined the U.S. team because it was cheaper than the ISF circuit.

“But some of the other [ISF] riders have a lot of resentment,” she says. “It’s a whole sellout issue.”

Haakonsen, the Norwegian superstar and spokesmen for a snowboarding generation, instantly diminished the halfpipe competition when he announced his boycott.

“Yeah, definitely,” Powers said. “For the person who gets first, everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, but Terje was not there.’ ”

Kosglow agrees with Haakonsen’s political stand but wishes he would have made it in Nagano.

“I think it would be better for him to win the gold medal and then tell everyone to . . . off,” she said.

Although an ISF supporter, Kosglow does not believe she is selling out by trying out for the Olympic team.

“OK, I have to wear a uniform,” she says. “For one day. The best riders have decided it’s not too much. The best riders are sucking it up, wearing uniforms, because it’s the Olympics. And no matter how emotional the political stuff is, and the animosity between riders, the fact is, it is the Olympics, and that’s what made everyone come around.”

The fallout:

Snowboarding’s debut on the world stage will be watched intently, and the rift in the sport threatens its future.

Kosglow says the controversy will continue until some of snowboarding’s radical thinkers come to grips with the fact that those wonderful, rebellious, counter-culture days are history.

“The sport went mainstream five years ago,” she says. “Everyone and their dog snowboards. I don’t see it as a sellout. The glory days are over. A lot of people, it’s almost like they almost want to be banned from resorts again. I’m not joking. It’s like they want to see those days come back.”

When it comes down to it, maybe representing America in the Olympics won’t be half-bad.

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Richards acknowledged. “It’s my country, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I have a lot of pride. It would be cool to come home with a medal for the USA.”