BARDONECCHIA, Italy – The grand old sport of snowboardcross, a wild pack race that dates all the way back to 1991, made its Olympic debut Thursday and let’s just say that you can keep the biathlon.
American Seth Wescott won the first-ever gold medal when he slid inside the leader on a turn halfway down the sinuous, banked course and held on for the win.
“It’s amazing to get here today and get this done,” said Wescott, a 29-year-old who failed in two attempts to make the Olympic halfpipe team, but knew his time was coming when the boardercross discipline was added for the Turin Games.
“Then it was less a question of whether I would make the team than what I could go and accomplish,” Wescott said.
Just getting to the bottom of the run in the elimination-style event is an accomplishment. The racers go four at a time down the course – jostling, maneuvering, sliding and crashing – with the top two advancing from each run until the final round.
As you can imagine, this leads to great racing and some hard feelings.
“You guys want a quote?” U.S. racer Nate Holland said at the bottom of the hill after being knocked out of a quarterfinal round by a fall. “If Jason Smith would have gotten his (butt) in gear, I wouldn’t have wrecked.”
Smith, a U.S. teammate, slowed in front of Holland going into a turn and the airborne Holland had no place to land. As a result, he landed on the ground.
“It’s Olympic game day. I don’t know what he’s doing,” Holland said. “Why is he speed-checking when everybody else is riding it straight?”
A reasonable question, assuming one even knows what he’s talking about. It is the equivalent, apparently, of a NASCAR driver wondering why the lunkhead in front of him slowed in the corner and made everyone go sideways.
“Here he comes,” Holland said helpfully. “Why don’t you ask him?”
So we did. American reporters may not know boardercross, but we know a fight.
“It’s racing. Unfortunate things happen. That’s why people like to watch it,” Smith said. “I felt I made the smarter move there. I made the speed check off that jump and he didn’t. He landed flat and fell. That was the choice each of us made.”
So there.
Smith only made it one more round, getting knocked out in a semifinal heat by Wescott and eventual bronze-medal winner Paul-Henri Delerue of France.
In the final, once Wescott ducked past silver medalist Rado Zidek of Slovakia, there was no catching him. It was a risky sort of move – Zidek could have leaned over and run Wescott off the course – but this is a guy who jumps out of helicopters to snowboard down avalanche areas. Risk doesn’t exactly bother him.
“That’s a life or death situation,” Wescott said of his free-jumping adventures. “It’s a different sense of urgency than racing boardercross.”
Wescott has dreamed of competing in the Olympic Games (stop me if you’ve heard that before) since 1984 when the Los Angeles Olympics became the first television show he ever watched. His father, a track-and-field coach at N.C. State, was the coach of marathoner Joan Benoit.
“I grew up in a house without TV, but he had to break down at that point because he wanted to watch her run,” Wescott said.
The family moved to Maine not long after, and Wescott overlapped briefly at Carrabassett Valley Academy with Bode Miller, the alpine bad boy. They are still friends and Wescott appeared on David Letterman just before the Games with his Top 10 list of reasons he was looking forward to the Turin Olympics. Reason No. 1? “Will be Bode Miller’s designated driver.”
Obviously, the list changed Thursday, and the sport of boardercross – an X-Games staple, but what isn’t? – slid into a much wider public consciousness.
“The country loves NASCAR and this is kind of that element,” Wescott said. “People can watch snowboard halfpipe and not really understand the intricacies, but with this, they understand the racing aspect and that translates to the viewing public. Head-to-head racing is a big thing in the U.S.”
If they can just get the guys throwing their helmets at each other at the bottom of the hill – a la NASCAR – then they will really have something.
“That kind of stuff happens at every event,” U.S. snowboard coach Pete Foley said of the difference of opinion between Holland and Smith. “It’s just frustration. Nate had it in mind to win, but it didn’t go his way. It’s the Olympics.”
And boardercross is in the Olympics now. Whatever it is, it was great.
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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): Bordercross
AP-NY-02-16-06 1705EST
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