BARDONECCHIA, Italy – The Turin Games have not received the kind of raucous response the International Olympic Committee hoped for when it awarded its two-week sports festival to the Italians.
Few spectators sat in frigid temperatures to watch the luge doubles final Wednesday, leading to complaints from athletes.
A similar scene unfolded at the women’s 500-meter speed skating at Oval Lingotto in Turin on Tuesday.
“It feels like just another World Cup event,” U.S. skater Jennifer Rodriguez said.
It wasn’t like that Thursday in Bardonecchia, where snowboard cross made its debut on a cold but clear day near the French border. People came.
And they oohed and ahed as this made-for-TV spectacle brought out the spirit that had been missing in the first week of the Games.
“This will make the Winter Olympics,” said spectator Tim Windell, who runs a snowboard camp on Mount Hood.
He might have overstated it, but Windell was among the enthusiastic fans crammed together to watch the six-run, one-day event won by American Seth Wescott.
Talking about the Turin Games, Windell said, “It was dead.”
Snowboard cross has a special appeal, said fans watching Thursday, because the first rider to the finish wins. No subjective judging to spoil the competition.
“People can understand four guys pushing each other to the finish,” Windell said.
Wescott marveled at the amount of marketing snowboarding received for these Olympics. Still, he knows what sponsors see.
“The whole concept of head-to-head racing in the United States is a big thing,” he said. “This kind of lends itself to that for all those who are not snowboarders.”
The audience waved flags, blew horns and cheered through the spellbinding action, especially during a crash.
“I lost my voice because it was so exciting,” said youngster Cami Klein of Lake Tahoe, Calif.
She is just the target audience Olympic officials hoped to capture when they added snowboarding to the Games in 1998. Realizing that Nordic skiing and curling don’t exactly excite today’s youth, they’ve gone the way of the X Games in an effort to re-energize the Winter Games.
“It’s just fresh,” said Lake Tahoe’s Nat Schirman, a former freestyle skier carrying a flag to support his friend, U.S. snowboarder Nate Holland. “They had to do something to keep younger kids interested.”
The athletes are fun and free-spirited and not afraid of risks. That go-for-it attitude resonates with today’s youngsters. Ueli Kestenholz, a snowboarder from Switzerland, expressed the sentiment: “We don’t need brakes. I wish we had gas sometimes, but we don’t need brakes.”
Gasoline, that is. Snowboard cross, or SBX, often is compared to motocross because athletes negotiate huge bumps on the course to make it, well, more interesting.
Holland’s father was ecstatic after witnessing the sport’s Olympic debut.
“Your breath is just sucked away,” Tom Holland said. “Three or four going through a turn made for one, how are they going to get out of that?”
His son didn’t: He was one of a handful of favorites eliminated in crashes. Although the accidents left the riders frustrated, they add to snowboard cross’ appeal.
Americans love watching a good crash – as long as the rider walks away. Snowboard cross offers that kind of action, making it easy to digest even without understanding its intricacies.
Thursday, it translated to a huge success. And with Wescott’s victory, the United States won its sixth gold medal of the Turin Games. That ties for the most gold medals in a Winter Olympics outside the United States.
With the anticipation of another possible gold medal in the women’s SBX today, the United States has found its niche in snowboarding. And the Olympics have found their breakout hit.
Perhaps just in time.
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