STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — First came the surfboard, then the skateboard and finally the snowboard. But only one of them has achieved the status of an Olympic sport — which you would think would make serious snowboarders glow with pride. It hasn’t.

In a major blow to the boarding world, Terje Haakonsen, the three-time half-pipe world champion, won’t be going to Nagano next month to compete in the first-ever Olympic snowboarding event. And without Haakonsen, known to many simply as “The Legend,” the snowboarding competition has about as much allure as women’s figure skating would have without Michelle Kwan.

Haakonsen and many of his Scandinavian snowboarding colleagues are already deeply suspicious of the commercial motives behind turning his sport into an Olympic event. Haakonsen also has nothing but disdain for the Games’ governing body, the International Olympic Committee, which he likens to organized crime.

“When I say Mafia,” he explained to Sweden’s TV4 recently, “I mean what most people see in the word: people who take over control but never let anyone have an inside look at what they are doing.”

Along with its smugness and secrecy, the IOC, says Haakonsen, is strictly a rich men’s club. “The fact is that bigwigs ride in limousines and stay in fancy hotels while the athletes live in barracks in the woods,” he told the Oslo newspaper Verdens Gand.

Edge Magazine, the leading skate and snowboard magazine in Scandinavia, is so contemptuous of the whole affair that it has decided not to cover the Olympics at all. “Snowboarders are independent people who just want to go free riding and do things their own way,” says Kristoffer Bjvrkman, editor of Edge. “All of a sudden they have to obey a massive set of rules, maybe even wear Olympic gear. It would not surprise me the least if some boarder will try to rebel by riding buck naked in Nagano.”

Beneath the anger, however, lies a deeper issue for snowboarders: Is what they do a sport or a lifestyle? And if it’s a lifestyle, what the hell is it doing in the Olympics in the first place? Many snowboarders, says Bjvrkman, have retained a “rebel attitude” they acquired in their skateboarding days.

“For instance,” Bjvrkman explains, “the word practice has never been a part of the snowboarding vocabulary, but in order to make it to the Olympics you really do have to practice. Dealing with sponsorships is another ordeal to many free-spirited snowboarders. If you want to make a living off snowboarding, you have to kiss ass like never before. You have to suck up to sponsors and participate in degrading contests and events.”

Still, with money out there to be made, not every snowboarder is following the Scandinavian’s principled lead. “The Germans and Swiss have started to snowboard,” observes a local, “but they don’t know how to do it. They don’t have the style at all. They’ve learned the tricks, but they really lack the true spirit of snowboarding.”

What is that “spirit”? Scandinavian boarders speak vaguely of the “feeling” the true boarder brings, a quality, they insist, that an Olympic judge could never understand. Instead, they say, Olympic spectators are likely to see a great deal of “spin to win” — meaning he who spins on his board the most wins — from competitors who are mediocre in most other ways. Bjvrkman cites German snowboarder Fabian Rohrer, “who wins championship after championship, although he’s a lousy snowboarder!”

Ultimately, says Bjvrkman, snowboarding is a lifestyle, not an Olympic sport. “This lifestyle is an art,” he says, “and you can’t compete in art.”

The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics on Wednesday after failing in two previous attempts.

Pyeongchang defeated rivals Munich and Annecy, France, in the first round of a secret ballot of the International Olympic Committee.

Needing 48 votes for victory, Pyeongchang received 63 of the 95 votes cast. Munich received 25 and Annecy seven.

The Koreans had lost narrowly in previous bids for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics.

Pyeongchang will be the first city in Asia outside Japan to host the Winter Games. Japan held the games in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998.

Olympic gold-medalist Lindsey Vonn has recreated that scene from “Basic Instinct” on the cover of ESPN magazine. And by “that scene” I do mean the one in which Sharon Stone infamously flashed her naughty bits to the world. It’s the magazine’s movie issue — why ESPN has a movie issue, I do not know — and it boasts a bunch of athletes reproducing classic film scenes. The headline accompanying the saucy cover photo is, wait for it, “Back to Basics.” Funny, I thought the magazine’s Body Issue — which came out just a few months ago and features exquisitely athletic naked bodies — was a return to “basics.” But it doesn’t get any more basic, or base, than paying homage to the most famous crotch shot in cinematic history.

London Olympic organizers say a record 5,000 doping tests will be carried out at the 2012 Games.

The local organizing committee has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain’s anti-doping body and will implement the testing program under the authority of the International Olympic Committee.

London 2012 director of sport Debbie Jevans says the size of the testing program will give a “strong message that drug cheats are not welcome at the London Games.”

UK Anti-Doping will train anti-doping officials and assist them during the event to carry out a 10 percent increase on the 4,500 tests conducted at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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Canada’s women’s hockey team has scored quite the controversy by daring to celebrate their win against the U.S. on Thursday by sipping beer, guzzling champagne and smoking cigars on the ice. After the fans filtered out of the stadium, the ladies returned to the rink still in uniform with gold medals draped around their necks. They laid on the ice, poured champagne in each other’s mouths and soaked up the Olympic glory. Their revelry hardly would have garnered any attention, except for one minor detail: there was an Associated Press photographer on hand to capture it all on film.