Dave Barry

Snowboarding goes to pot        February 14, 1998

NAGANO, Japan -- BUMMER. We had another scandal here at the Winter Olympics (Official Motto: ``64 Events; Zero Indoor Toilets.'')

This scandal involved snowboarding, the hot new sport that was added to the Olympics for these Games in hopes of attracting members of Generation X (which, in Celsius, is Generation H). What happened was, a Canadian snowboarder named Ross Rebagliati won the men's giant slalom, but then, during routine drug testing, he tested positive for a banned substance: Monica Lewinsky.

No, I promise that is absolutely my last Monica Lewinsky joke until I think of another one. Rebagliati in fact tested positive for marijuana. For a while it looked as though he might be disqualified, but finally the International Olympic Committee decided to let him keep his medal on the grounds that, in the words of the official IOC statement, ``He can't remember where he put it.''

While this scandal was going on, I went out to see the other Olympic snowboarding event, which is called the ``halfpipe'' (insert your marijuana joke here). I happen to be something of an expert on snowboarding, having taken one lesson on a hill in Idaho chosen especially for its great natural hardness. I was nervous at the start, but I found it to be a truly exhilarating experience from the moment I stepped onto the board until the moment, three billionths of a second later, when the back of my head slammed into the hill hard enough to set off earthquake alarms in Peru.

The Olympic snowboarders did quite a bit better. They came zigzagging (insert another marijuana joke here) down a big U-shaped gully carved into the snow, hurtling up the sides and performing spectacular tricks with names like the ``360,'' the ``540,'' the ``720,'' the ``1080'' the ``Cosine'' and the extremely difficult ``Slinging the Hot Bunny,'' which is when the snowboarder, while hanging in midair, gets his or her nipples pierced. These are classic, traditional maneuvers that have been part of snowboarding since the very early days of the sport (Jan. 12 and 13, 1995).

During each run, big loudspeakers blasted music selected by the competitor, with the most popular performers being rappers, Jimi Hendrix, and of course the Captain and Tenille, whose ``Muskrat Love'' is a huge favorite with these ``shredders.'' At the end of the run, the competitors received scores from the judges based on amplitude, rotation, landings, technical merit and bagginess of pants.

It was a cold and rainy day, but thousands of enthusiastic Japanese spectators were on hand to not actually watch the event. I am serious: The way it was set up, most of the spectators could not see any part of the halfpipe. They had to watch the competition on one of those big outdoor TV screens. It was like buying a ticket to the Super Bowl and discovering your seat was located outside of the stadium.

If you tried to do this to sporting-event spectators the United States, they would express their displeasure via a combination of lawsuits and automatic-weapons fire. But the Japanese are not complainers; they just sat there in the freezing rain for five hours and happily cheered the TV picture. They always cheer for all the competitors; in fact the worse a competitor does, the more they cheer. You could fall down at the top of the halfpipe and slide all the way to the bottom on your face, getting no amplitude whatsoever, and the Japanese spectators would give you a huge round of applause. And then the Japanese snowboarders would deliberately slide down on their faces, just so you wouldn't feel embarrassed.

Anyway, however you watched it, this was definitely the finest halfpipe snowboarding competition in Olympic history. The only bad thing was that the gold medals were won by a woman from Germany and a man from Switzerland. This is not fair! Where do these people get off, being foreigners? This is supposed to be an AMERICAN sport! We Americans INVENTED Jimi Hendrix!

In fact, the U.S. athletes are not winning many medals here. It is a severe blow to our national pride.

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