U.S. snowboarder Chris Klug carved a different trail to Vancouver Games

Reporting from Vancouver, Canada — 

What do you do if you get kicked out of a neighborhood pickup game?

Go start another one with another team.

That’s just about what veteran snowboarder Chris Klug did after he was dropped from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.’s program last year. He formed a team with four others.

It’s a do-it-yourself parallel giant slalom team.

“I still wanted to continue,” Klug said this week. “I had some unfinished business. It turned out to be a real blessing in disguise.”

The Olympics have been marked by the appearance of veteran athletes in the so-called extreme sports. There was 37-year-old Casey Puckett and 36-year-old Daron Rahlves in the new Olympic sport of ski cross, and a 43-year-old mother of three, Katharina Gutensohn of Austria, in women’s ski cross.

Klug’s stories transcends his age. He is 37, but his appearance in yet another Winter Olympics, his third, goes beyond the Games. He won a bronze medal in 2002 in Salt Lake City after he had a liver transplant in 2000.

He recognizes the powers of persuasion and the platform that an Olympian has in advancing the cause of organ donation.

Trying to predict the outcome of Saturday’s men’s race would be difficult enough without the possibility of inclement weather hitting Cypress Mountain.

“I’ll be ready to go for it,” Klug wrote on his website. “I didn’t come here to lay up.”

lisa.dillman@latimes.com