This time of year, Seth Wescott gets wistful. Why wouldn’t he, especially this year?

Next week is the 20th anniversary of Wescott’s gold medal-winning run in the inaugural Olympic snowboardcross. He won his second gold at Vancouver in 2010. If that makes you feel old, it makes Wescott, 49, feel older.

Wescott, a Maine native, will pay special attention to the men’s snowboardcross when competition begins Thursday. The United States’ best chance for a medal might be Mainer Nathan Pare, who celebrated his 21st birthday last week and placed third in the last World Cup race before the Olympics. Wescott pointed at Pare, of Bethel, and Team USA developmental squad athlete Boden Gerry, 19, of Carrabassett Valley with Maine pride.

“That’s a sizable chunk of our future U.S. National team that are both Maine kids, and that just excites the hell out of me,” Wescott said in a recent phone interview. “It’s cool to see Nathan at such a young age making a mark.”

Wescott spoke while he drove around running errands in rural British Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Kitt, and 8-year old daughter, Yéva, not too far from where he won his second gold medal. The sport he helped pioneer feels both close and far away.

“Whistler is where my daughter goes to school and we’ve got a 212-acre farm about 40 minutes north. So I’m running the farm. My wife and my daughter are into horses,” Wescott said. “It’s a whole different chapter, one that wasn’t on the bingo card, as they would say. I spend 80 days a summer making hay now. It leaves the winters free, which is nice.”

Wescott said he still rides 100 days a year, and he follows snowboardcross as much as he can. He marvels at the depth of the Olympic field in the sport.

“I think there’s just more of them. It’s a deeper talent pool now. You know, when I was there, there were 10 guys who could potentially win, and now it’s a lot more,” Wescott said. “There are a few extreme standouts like Eliot Grondin from Canada. He’s really over these last four years kind of staked his claim that he’s the guy to beat. The talent pool is super deep now.”

Wescott stays active in the sport when he can. As he spoke, he was getting ready to fly to Japan the next day to take part in a documentary about the development of Carrabassett Valley Academy’s snowboard program in the 1990s. He planned to meet with the other three forefathers of the school’s snowboard school: Akira Matsumoto, who arrived at CVA at age 14 in the early 90s with the goal of representing Japan at the Nagano Olympics in 1998; Mark Fawcett, who arrived from New Brunswick and raced for Canada in the 1998 and 2002 Games; and Jeremy Jones, who Wescott called the most famous big mountain snowboarder of the last 30 years.

The documentary is a chance to catch up with old friends, he said, and look at the different paths they’ve taken in the snowboard industry. He hopes the film will be ready for film festivals in the fall.

Wescott is thinking maybe he’d like his path to veer back toward snowboardcross. He’s spent time with members of the Canadian national team when they’ve trained in the Whistler area. Wescott knows he could help a group of young, talented American riders get even better.

“My daughter is 8 now. It feels like I’m just getting to a time period that I could start to have some freedom to be on the road a little bit to do some of these training camps with the guys,” Wescott said. “Especially with this group of guys, I would love to get involved over these next eight years. Whether it’s just time at training camps or whatever. Rick Bower, who’s head of U.S. snowboarding right now, was one of my old teammates and a good friend … I would love to carve out time to mentor and help along the journey. Having the Maine connection, too, gets me that much more fired up.”

When he talks about getting involved, the excitement in Wescott’s voice is clear. Suddenly, 20 years doesn’t seem long ago at all.