You're Golden, Dude!

By Sean Gregory

Sometimes, it helps to roll into the Olympics utterly oblivious to the Games' gravitas, a weight largely manufactured by sponsors and NBC. Sometimes, it helps to just chill. And have a wicked good time. Case in point: the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team, rad and rippin', which bagged three titles last week in the pristine Alpine town of Bardonecchia, 60 miles northwest of Torino. It was a dominating performance that accounted for nearly half the country's total golden hardware.

Yet the U.S.'s two top women half-pipe snowboarders almost missed their final runs--the most important moment of their athletic lives--because they had crept away to an off-limits slope to sneak in some extra rides. Hannah Teter, 19, and Gretchen Bleiler, 24, returned in time to take home gold and silver, respectively. In the finals of the snowboard cross, a new, Roller-Derby-on-snow Olympic event in which four boarders twist and fly down a mountain to the finish, favorite Seth Wescott, 29, should have panicked, trailing Slovakia's Radoslav Zidek late in the race. (It's the Olympics, don't you know?) He didn't and cut off Zidek like a Torino taxi driver to win by one of the whiskers on his chin.

Pressure, what pressure? Shaun White, 19, the Michael Jordan of the half-pipe (the 16-ft.-deep mountainside trench in which snowboarders do their tricks), muffed a landing on his first qualifying run, a potential knockout blow that would have shocked his sport. But only a blizzard could keep that shaggy red mane off the podium. To clear his head, the "Flying Tomato" took a few easy rides with his coach between turns and then rocked the rest of the field when he got back in the pipe.

Snowboarding's carefree psyche does have its faults. For instance, it might actually help to pay attention to the competition. Snowboard crosser Lindsey Jacobellis was cruising last week to the team's fourth straight snowboard gold, which would have given the U.S. a clean sweep. Her lead was so big she could have snowshoed to the finish. But on the second- to-last jump she hot-dogged it, clutching the rail of her board in mid-air, and botched the landing so badly she fell and got silver instead. Going for show is totally in keeping with the snowboard m.o., except that in cross, style points are less useful than euros in Cleveland. It's a race. At first Jacobellis insisted she made the grab for balance, but later in the day, she started to fess up. "I wanted to share with the crowd my enthusiasm," she says. "I messed up."

Goofy or not, the shredders, long the muskrats of the mountain to the stately Alpine skiers, saved American pride on the snow during the first week of the Olympics. Bode Miller proved better on the dance floor than the slopes, finishing a disappointing fifth in the downhill, getting disqualified in the combined after taking the lead and not finishing the super-G. Lindsey Kildow wishboned her skis during a terrifying practice-run crash in the women's downhill and was air-lifted to a hospital in Torino. Miraculously, she raced two days later but finished eighth. Only the surprise winner of the combined slalom-downhill event, Ted Ligety, sparked the U.S. ski team, which had labeled itself "Best in the World." Don't tell that to the Austrians, who won five Alpine ski medals going into the second week of the Games.

The performance by America's riders marked another milestone for snowboarding in its rivalry with the sport of skiing. In fact, last week snowboarding trumped the older sport in attitude and drama. The rebels not only won the medals, but they were also winning fans. Some ski races were poorly attended, but the boarders rocked the hill. "Seeing the half-pipe guys and girls throw down the way that they did," says Wescott, borrowing his verbs from hip-hop, "and then for us to come up here and make history with the first snowboard cross--snowboarding is really becoming the heart and soul of the Olympic games."

Maybe not yet, Seth. Although some snowboarders--and their agents--insist they've gone mainstream, this is still a sport in which Blink 182 blares over the loudspeakers while the boarders McTwist and where a chain-smoking, black-bandanna-wearing public-address announcer--American Dave Duncan--pumps the crowd when there's a "smokin' run." His black T shirt at the women's half-pipe read, SKATE AND DESTROY. Not exactly Olympian, but your kids are catching on: the National Sporting Goods Association estimates there are more recreational snowboarders (6.6 million) than skiers (5.9 million) in the U.S. Look for that number to jump after Teter's talk-show tour. Says U.S. snowboard coach Peter Foley: "These are the sports that modern people do."

Snowboarding starts with the Flying Tomato. "Right now, he's up here," says U.S. half-pipe coach Bud Keene of White, hand raised high above his head. "Rarefied air." A prodigy, White would outrun the adults on Southern California's Big Bear Mountain--going backward. His consecutive 1080s (three complete rotations in the air, the toughest trick in the sport) secured his win last week. Afterward, White playfully set his sights on U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen ("I hope she dates gold medalists") and talked of a rendezvous with the Summer Olympics if skateboarding, the other action sport in which he stars, ever gets a bid. ("I think Sasha would dig that.")

While White is mellow, Teter, who followed his golden performance the next day, is more bubbly than New Year's champagne. And odder than a Brazilian bobsledder. Asked what she would do with her medal: "I'll staple it on a wall, with a real staple gun." Huh? To deprogram, Teter heads to a Benedictine monastery near her childhood home in tiny Belmont, Vt., to meditate and just hang with the rest of the robes. "I go there and kind of just forget about everything," Teter told TIME before the Games. "My life, my stresses, my world. They are sooooo cool, they are sooooo fun, and they're just supersmart and jolly, you know?" Jolly monks--of course. Says Keene: "With Hannah, there are no boundaries."

Wescott, whose dramatic win introduced the crash-and-burn world of snowboard cross to transfixed TV audiences, is the team's dad--and brain. The son of a college professor, Wescott devours lefty linguist Noam Chomsky, not the typical snowboarder fare. Wescott doesn't get away clean from the snowboarding stereotype. "He's so not a dude," says his sister, Sarah, 32. But "he can party with the best of them."

Jacobellis' party prior to the finish was the only blemish on a near perfect week. The poster child for the boarders, her blond braids were featured in a ubiquitous pre-Olympics Visa ad, where a nervous Jacobellis can't focus until her coach tells her to pretend that someone stole her check card. Cute. One problem--no card will buy her way out of this colossal embarrassment. "I can move on; it's just a race," she says. Just stay away from the replays.

With the featured slalom and giant-slalom events ahead of them this week, the Alpine types still had a chance to save their Olympics. But in the realm of the slopes, there was a sense that a turning point had been reached. Win or lose, they are no longer the kings and queens of the mountains.