CARRABASSETT VALLEY – Every community needs a Seth Wescott. Maine could handle about a thousand more, come to think of it.

Not his gold medal. Joan Benoit Samuelson and Ian Crocker showed us those, too. They’re nice. They glisten. They’ll be a conversation piece for us Vacationland lifers until said lives are a vapor trail.

Not his world championship. Joey Gamache brought us along for that ride. It’s all fun and games until the adjective ‘former’ gets attached to your name and you’re not being paid remotely enough to serve as another champ’s heavy bag on HBO.

Where the Farmington native and year-round Sugarloaf resident fills our state’s sorriest shortcoming is his willingness – no, make that overwhelming sense of obligation – to stick around and attach hands and feet to his celebrity.

Maine is hemorrhaging talent, ideas and vitality. Eighteen and intent upon conquering the planet, our best and brightest follow the trail of green paper and black ink to states that time hasn’t forgotten.

So it’s equal parts flabbergasting and praiseworthy that Wescott was here the first Saturday of 2009, braving the subzero wind chills and the egregious economy.

Nobody ever admonishes Wescott to remember his roots, because he’s still planted. Sugarloaf is his home and holiday destination; his past, present and future. Just as Samuelson bequeathed to us the world-class Beach to Beacon road race, Wescott has invited his descendants to spend their figurative inheritance long before he’s gone.

“I feel like it’s definitely a responsibility. It’s so neat for me to have seen the sport grow like this throughout the years,” said Wescott, known far beyond Franklin County’s jagged borders for winning the inaugural Olympic snowboardcross gold medal at the 2006 Games in Turin. “I met this 4-year-old kid the other day that’s a snowboarder. Four-year-olds weren’t doing that when I was getting involved with the sport.”

A Bicentennial baby, the 32-year-old Wescott only sports a hint of the crow’s feet that mark someone who spends most of his life a mile closer to the sun than the rest of us.

He’s in the prime of a career that will land him in multiple halls of fame, much too young to be anyone’s grandfather. Yet here was Wescott, betwixt triumphant World Cup whistle stops, cutting the ribbon and taking the first symbolic run down another trail that will immortalize him as undisputed Godfather of his athletic realm in his backyard.

Wescott unveiled the Sidewinder snowboardcross course at the ‘Loaf. This was no publicity stunt. No honorarium awaited. He oversaw the venture from its start, sketching the blueprint, to its conclusion, wheeling a snow cat throughout New Year’s week to ensure a grand opening for weekend warriors and Olympic dreamers alike.

Are-you-kidding-me stuff, considering that Wescott won a World Cup race in Switzerland two weeks ago and strives to reclaim his world championship later this month. Then again, where he’s going has never shaped Wescott as distinctively as where he was groomed.

“We used to hand-dig the half-pipe with shovels here,” he said. “It’s just been amazing in my 22 years of snowboarding here at Sugarloaf to see how the sport has grown, how it’s evolved, how it’s changed and then how it’s had an influence on skiing.”

Even Wescott takes a second to digest the thought of breathing the words ‘skiing’ and ‘snowboarding’ in the same paragraph.

Peculiar being a hero after you endured a childhood of dodging epithets and worse, simply because you chose to embrace a traditional winter sport’s bastard cousin.

“I remember getting spat at from the chair lifts because we were snowboarders,” Wescott said. “To be a 10-year-old kid and have parents screaming obscenities at you because you were doing something that you loved to do And we were respectful kids. We weren’t doing anything crazy. We were just trying to be out there sliding down the mountain and finding a way to have fun.”

Wescott wasn’t the first world class snowboarder to emerge from the modest hallways of the neighboring factory, Carrabassett Valley Academy.

Canada’s Mark Fawcett and California’s Jeremy Jones share that distinction. Together, they helped lure instructor Eric Webster from a professional tour and thrived under his tutelage. Jones has transformed snowboarding’s big mountain discipline into a breathtaking art form, becoming a viral video legend.

The Olympics, though, are what whisk all of us out of our stick-and-ball comfort zone every fourth February, elevating the anonymous and ruggedly individual onto billboards and cereal boxes. And so it’s Wescott with the clout, the cache and the congregation, none of which he approaches cavalierly.

“It’s exciting to look at what we’re able to be doing here in creating these new training and competition venues for the new generation of kids that’s coming after me,” said Wescott. “We’re giving them resources that I didn’t have when I was a kid here. If they want to pursue their dreams in a competitive field, we’re got the areas for them to do that now.”

Not that Wescott isn’t itching to depart the tarmac and return to the grind.

His triumph in Europe was a sign that any post-Olympic jinx might be merely a painful memory. Wescott shattered an arm in 2007. This year’s debut was just as hairy and twice as scary: Wescott fell 30 feet to the bottom of a landing in Argentina and walked away, mercifully, with a bruised back.

“It’s my goal to get the world championship title back prior to the (2010 Olympic) Games, because that brings a lot with it in that whole year of buildup,” Wescott said. “It kind of turns into a pressure cooker for this next year, and that’s fine. Having been through that and knowing how it works, I’m excited to go get it done and really have a productive summer of training and go defend my medal in Vancouver.”

That prelude to British Columbia includes at least one more competitive stop on home powder. The World Cup lands at Sunday River in Newry late next month. Wescott was a consultant to the course designer and will be a favorite to win.

Until then, Wescott gives us more than enough cause for exultation as a favorite son.

One we can still reach out and touch. Imagine that.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].