Caution: Old Fogey Alert

I touched upon here the difficulty I had accepting snowboarding as an Olympic sport. Those thoughts haven't changed, and if snowboarding is on during the NBC family of networks' Olympic coverage, I tend to turn away immediately to something else - if Animal Planet ran the Puppy Bowl during the Olympics like they do during the Super Bowl, I probably would have watched that instead. (For the uninitiated, the Puppy Bowl is three hours of puppies playing. That's it - just puppies playing. I believe that this year, they also had kittens playing.)

HOWEVER, thanks to the time difference between Turin (or Torino or Totino's or whatever the rightful name of the city is) and the United States, and the fact that NBC's primetime coverage of the Olympics features events that have already taken place several hours before, I was tipped off to the rather comical ending of the "women's snowboardcross" (WTF?) event on Friday.

Here's a story about the gold medal that wasn't for the Americans. Long story short, Lindsey Jacobellis had about a three-second lead in the event with about 100 meters to go when she began hot-dogging it on the next-to-last jump ... at which point, she busted her ass, tried to recover, and was passed at the final jump by her closest competitor, a Swiss rider. The video, if you happen to see it, is pretty priceless. Gold medalist Tanja Friedan began celebrating with her coach and teammates, while a mere 5 feet away, Jacobellis stood watching in shock. It is a piece of fabulous video, and I'm so happy I had the heads-up of the results so I could tape it. I hope I never accidentally tape over it, but I'm sure I will.

But that's the problem I have with the whole concept of snowboarding-as-Olympic-sport: the complete and utter disrespect and lack of etiquette shown by its participants, especially those of the American variety. Sure, I can imagine - and have seen - showboaters in other sports, and they get their comeuppance as often as not. But Jacobellis' "Hey, y'all, watch this!" moment is a microcosm of everything I hate about snowboard pollution at the Olympics.

I have a hard time accepting that "half-pipe" is a legitimate sport. Is it an athletic endeavor? Sure - it requires you to be off your hash pipe long enough to do loop-de-loos and twisty twirls and the other stunts they do. Is it a sport? Questionable, though my vote is for "no" - typically, if it requires a judge to tell me whether I won or lost, if I'm required to attain "style points," then I have a hard time considering it a sport.

"But what about gymnastics and figure skating?" you ask.

Yeah, what about them?

"Well, they use judges!"

Yeah? So?

"Aren't you being a little hypocritical?"

Yeah.

"Boxing, too, if one opponent isn't knocked out."

Shut up.

I will grant that, because it was a race instead of a judged competition, and because there is a clear winner at the end after the leader falls down to my great joy, "snowboardcross" is closer to legitimacy than any of the other Winter X sports that have invaded the Olympic movement. But I don't see myself ever truly embracing it.

The SF Chronicle article I linked above also spoke about the fact that without the snowboarders, Americans would only have won 4 medals thus far, instead of the 10 that is shown in the medal standings. I accept that Americans have been traditionally awful in winter sports, and I have no expectations of us ever sitting on top of the standings after the Winter Games are over, because we are not a nation that really loves its winter sports. But to artificially inflate the numbers with "sports" that we created reeks of ... well, it just reeks.