Keeping the Olympics on Edge

It was hardly the Olympic ideal.

On a sunny day at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, Danny Kass stood above the halfpipe, inching his snowboard toward the edge, with dark hair down to his shoulders and earphones pumping Metallica. Had an athlete ever gone for the gold while plugged into heavy metal?

Kass embodied the uneasy marriage between snowboarding and the Winter Olympics, renegade punks thrown together with a hidebound bureaucracy, a match fraught with backroom disputes and an embarrassing marijuana controversy.

But when the New Jersey teenager dropped into the pipe, twisting and flipping his way to a silver medal, he helped fuel an unlikely transformation.

Four years later, his sport is a marquee event at the 2006 Turin Games. The awkward relationship has given way to a full-on embrace as the International Olympic Committee and its business partners -- most notably NBC -- look to give their spectacle a younger, hipper feel, and once-disdainful snowboarders are now only too happy to sidle up to corporate sponsors and cash big paychecks.

It’s “The Blue Danube” meets Green Day. Or as Andy Finch, a U.S. competitor in the men’s halfpipe today, put it: “The Olympic committee respects snowboarders, and the snowboarders see what the Olympics can do for them.”

Some people point to Salt Lake City in 2002, when Kass and his teammates made headlines, and prime-time television, by finishing 1-2-3. The women’s halfpipe team might equal that feat in Turin.

The truth is, it took more than a few inverted flips to foster this unlikely romance.

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The sport was born of rebellion, a loose collection of inventors and individualists breaking ranks in the 1960s, hungry to get down the mountain in what they saw as a more stylish, exciting way.

Snowboarders established a distinct culture, infused with a heavy backbeat and streetwise fashion -- baggy pants and jackets, knit caps tugged down tight. They needed a new language, borrowing from skateboarding, talking about fakies and frontsides, verts and laybacks.

From the start, skiers reacted with suspicion if not scorn, and many resorts banned the upstarts. But as snowboarding’s popularity exploded -- particularly among the young -- Olympic officials saw an opportunity.

“They need new events to shake things up,” said Kevin Wamsley, a researcher and former director of the International Center for Olympic Studies in Canada. “The corporations that sponsor the Olympics are all about marketing strategies, and to replicate the same program year after year means they’re not going to gain the approval of the younger crowd.”

Most sports must court the IOC for years to gain admittance. In this case, the Olympics came calling. Yet problems arose almost as soon as officials decided to add snowboarding to the program.

Instead of welcoming the International Snowboarding Federation, which was run by the athletes themselves, the IOC folded the young sport into the established skiing federation.

“That created a lot of bad feelings,” Wamsley said. “It was a weak start.”

The world’s premier boarder at the time, Terje Haakonsen of Norway, referred to IOC members as “ski Nazis” and refused to compete when his sport made its debut at the 1998 Nagano Games.

The situation grew worse when Ross Rebagliati of Canada won the gold medal in the giant slalom, then tested positive for marijuana.

Rebagliati blamed secondhand smoke, but “it just perpetuated the stereotype of the lawless snowboarder, the unruly kid,” said Tracy Anderson, senior editor of Future Snowboarding magazine.

The IOC, accustomed to dealing with muscle-building steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, had no firm policy on marijuana. Rebagliati won an appeal to keep his medal, and IOC Director-General Francois Carrard called the whole thing sad.

“The IOC just hates to have bad press,” Wamsley said. “These crises are a major pain in the neck.”

Yet for all the embarrassment at Nagano, experts say there wasn’t much chance of the IOC walking away.

“You’ve got the Olympic movement and all of its ideals, but you also have a business here,” said Peter Carlisle, managing director of Olympic and action sports for Octagon, whose agents represent world-class athletes in numerous sports. “The IOC has a business. NBC has a business.”

So the Games stood by snowboarding and a funny thing happened: The sport grew up -- in ways that might have troubled some of its pioneers.

“You had kids saying, ‘If I’m an athlete putting my body on the line and I’m only making $2,000 a month, working just as hard as some wide receiver or probably harder than a lot of baseball players who are making millions ... I’ll go for the television exposure.’ That’s really how it started,” said Sal Masekela, an ESPN commentator who has followed snowboarding for years.

About the time the Olympics approved snowboarding, ESPN created the X Games, a made-for-television event with rap music blasting from loudspeakers, colored lights along the halfpipe and throngs of young fans. Top snowboarders got a taste of the exposure and prize money that came with a corporate-sponsored event.

Television executives also liked what they saw.

“Aesthetically, on the screen, it’s one of the prettier sports,” said Mike McCarley, head of NBC sports publicity. “There are times when all you see are blue sky and the rider.”

It wasn’t long before a new generation of boarders came along. They were vaulting 18 feet into the air, performing 1,080-degree spins and gymnastics far more technical than their predecessors. Many did not know about Terje Haakonsen and couldn’t remember a time when snowboarding wasn’t commercialized.

Nineteen-year-old Shaun White, a gold medal favorite in Turin, turned professional at 13 and signed with Target and other sponsors. In a sport still learning to be a business, he ranks as the top earner, with more than $1 million in annual endorsements.

Kelly Clark, the defending gold medalist in the women’s halfpipe, is among six riders who formed their own team, “The Collection,” and struck deals with Snickers and Yamaha.

Snowboarding, she says, “has progressed so much in the last few years.”

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It should be no surprise that NBC is planning a prime-time broadcast for today’s halfpipe final in the mountain town of Bardonecchia.

Less than two years after the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney brought anemic ratings -- in part because they were heavily tape-delayed -- the men’s sweep at Salt Lake City ranked among the highlights of a two-week broadcast that was a ratings success.

“We really took a flier and decided to go full-bore with our snowboarding coverage,” NBC’s McCarley said. “It was a calculated risk and it did really well.”

This time, the Games will offer yet another competition -- a race called the snowboard cross -- and the network will expand its halfpipe coverage to include more preliminary runs.

Upon arriving in Turin, the U.S. team was ushered into a packed news conference.

“It seems like a bigger deal this time around,” Clark said. “People have seen it and they know what to expect.”

There are still some snowboarders who shun the Olympics and corporate sponsorship, Clark said, but she guesses their numbers are dwindling.

Kass, known as a bad boy even among his peers, says he doesn’t hear so many comments about selling out. The kid with the long hair and earphones sounds almost conformist when asked about the holdouts.

“There are some people who might not be into the Olympics,” he said.

“But then, they might not be able to make the team, so you can’t take them seriously.”