Historic Victory May Sweep Away ‘Outlaw’ Image

Their historic sweep occurred four days ago and about 700 miles away, on a halfpipe cut into the slopes of Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort. But the electrifying performances of U.S. Olympic snowboarders Ross Powers, Danny Kass and Jarret [J.J.] Thomas remain fresh in the minds and hearts of riders across the land.

Inspired in part by gold- , silver- and bronze-winning performances Monday before an international audience of millions, snowboarders young and old took to the slopes this week brimming with national pride and ready to put on skillful and courageous displays of their own.

“This is my first time, and I’m really bad at it,” said 11-year-old Wallis Anawalt of Pasadena, from the bottom of a Mountain High run called Cruiser. “I crawled all the way down.”

But then she and her friend, 12-year-old Angela Pascal of Los Feliz, boldly rode the chair back up for another try.

Young and Old Riders Have New Enthusiasm

Nearby, Keith Hudgson, 50, from Lake Forest, was taking a breather. A longtime skier, he said watching Olympic snowboarding this week prompted him to finally trade two planks for one.

“I won’t be doing somersaults in the halfpipe like those guys or anything, but it’s a lot of fun,” he said.

And so it went on a brisk and sunny midweek day at the biggest resort in this small town in the San Gabriel Mountains. Outnumbering skiers by about 8 to 1, snowboarders of all ages and abilities were getting a jump on what figures to be a very crowded three-day holiday weekend, riding the mountain and enjoying a vicarious thrill or two along the way.

“I want to be there one day,” Erin Long, 25, of El Cajon, said of the Olympics. “I would love to be able to jump like that.”

The sweep, a first in Olympic snowboarding, has fans of the sport hopeful that stereotypes of snowboarders as rebellious, anti-establishment types will be quashed.

The stereotype was reinforced when snowboarding made its Olympic debut in the 1998 Games at Nagano, Japan. Some of the world’s top riders shunned the Games, prompting the same attitude among many of their followers. It didn’t help that Canada’s Ross Rebagliati, winner of the giant slalom, was temporarily stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for marijuana.

But this year, with the sport four years older and its top athletes seemingly a good deal more mature, there seems to be a fresh attitude about Olympic snowboarding. That became especially apparent by the men’s sweep, which came a day after American Kelly Clark won gold in the women’s halfpipe.

“Now the parents will be getting more excited about the sport,” said Mike Griffith, a longtime rider from Newport Beach. “They’re not going to shove a board on and dive into the halfpipe, but they’re going to be more willing to spend money on the children and even try it themselves.”

Several local snowboarders said it was about time an “outlaw” sport hit the mainstream.

“I think it’s cool to see the sport take a front seat,” said John Wade, 27, of Monrovia. “To have the Americans take all the medals like that makes a statement, although I did like that guy from Finland [Heikki Sorsa] wearing a Mohawk.”

Equally impressed was John Leavitt, 34, a serviceman stationed with Long at the U.S. Navy base in San Diego. “It blows me away,” he said. “I’ve surfed all of my life, and that sport never quite made it into the mainstream. Then snowboarding came along, turned into an Olympic sport and now we pull off a sweep? That’s pretty amazing.”

Though only a beginner, Anawalt said she wouldn’t be surprised to see snowboarding someday become more popular than skateboarding, another favorite among America’s youth.

From 1995 to 2000, skateboarding and snowboarding were the fastest-growing sports for boys ages 7 to 17, according to the National Sporting Goods Assn. Respectively, they experienced increases of 129.5% and 119.3%. In the same span, golf participation increased 31.6% and basketball, baseball and football experienced declines.

From 1990 to 2000, snowboarding increased from 1.5 million participants to 4.3 million, a jump of about 187%.

Snowboarding’s rise in popularity helped revitalize a ski industry that was stagnant in the mid-1990s. Nationally, snowboarders make up 43% of the people on the slopes on a given day. And in Southern California, they are 55% to 60% of the client base, according to Bob Roberts, executive director of the California Ski Industry Assn.

Before, X Games Helped Popularize the Sport

At Mountain High this season, snowboarders at times make up as much as 95% of the clientele, resort officials said.

Snowboarding’s growth can in part be attributed to ESPN’s Winter X Games, which since 1997 have provided a stage for new-age athletic competitions.

Now the Olympics have come along to provide an even larger and more illuminant spotlight, and making the most of their moments were Powers, Kass and Thomas, whose celebrity status is already beginning to expand well beyond the snowboarding community.

There they were schmoozing with the rock band Foo Fighters before Monday’s medal ceremony. On Tuesday, their agents were busy lining up appointments with hosts of morning and late-night talk shows. In the coming weeks, they are likely to be asked to sell much more than snowboards, boots and other apparel.

Which is highly worrisome to many within snowboarding’s close-knit fraternity, who are afraid that the grass-roots sport they’ve long been so passionate about might soon be swallowed up by corporate America.

“That’s my biggest fear,” said Todd Richards, 32, a veteran pro from Encinitas. “With the sweep and all the hype I hope these guys don’t get roped into endorsing things they don’t even believe in.

“What concerns me is that I might see them in some crazy shampoo commercial or something, using that random, crazy lingo they all think we all use.”