King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Snowboard cross: Finally, an X Games-style sport that's worth watching. Plus: Figure skating.

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Feb. 17, 2006 | Snowboard cross is a winner.

The event, a race down a motocross-style course on snowboards, with four competitors going at a time, was contested in the Olympics for the first time Thursday. American Seth Wescott won the gold medal, and extreme sports have finally contributed something worthwhile to the landscape.

Women's SBX, as the kids call it, was scheduled for Friday, with 20-year-old American Lindsey Jacobellis, the sport's dominant figure, a gold-medal favorite.

Wescott is a refugee from halfpipe, where he said he grew dissatisfied with the judging. That's the problem with all of the X Games-style sports, or at least most of them. They're variations on figure skating, gymnastics or diving. The athlete does something, and then the judges tell them how well they did it. Too subjective.

And with one competitor at a time in play, too repetitive.

Since extreme sports are all about attitude and individualism, it's kind of funny that they're built on the figure-skating model.

Snowboard cross is the exception. The snowboarders don't just battle the course, they battle each other. There's not a lot of room for the four of them, and there's a lot of strategy involved in jockeying for position and deciding when to try to pass. Plus, they're going fast. Plus, there are a lot of crashes.

It makes for a pretty wild event. Wescott, who likes to run in front, thus avoiding the tangles and spills that plague the pack -- the other three racers -- fell behind Radoslav Zidek of Slovakia early in the final race, then darted inside him on a right-hand turn to take the lead late in the race. Zidek took silver.

The Winter Olympics have gotten a shot in the arm, artistically if not commercially, from the influx of extreme sports. The freestyle skiers and snowboarders have brought a welcome dose of, frankly, American youth and style to the Winter Games, which tend toward Lycra-clad Nordic automatons and stodgy figure-skating divas.

Sports Illustrated ran a two-page posed photo of most of the snowboarding team in its Olympic preview, and it looked like a publicity still from a Fox youth drama. Seven of the nine boarders -- or "Super Shredders," as the headline called them -- wore blue jeans, and it didn't look like one of those embarrassing "Hey, let's put them all in blue jeans" shots.

The snowboarders seem like regular people, kids who happen to be good at something. They bring their laid-back culture to the Games, downplaying the importance of medals at every opportunity, and they present a refreshing contrast to the Type-A zealots who make up so much of the elite athlete population, the skaters and skiers who left home to live in training academies as middle schoolers. That crowd.

Next page: Feeling guilty for finding extreme sports so boring. Plus: Hockey, figure skating, curling