It went off with an unruly roar and the guttural "ooohs" that come when a man winds up splayed against a ski gate. And after a day of snowboard cross, the Olympics might never be the same.
This was the great experiment, a chance for an aging Games to relate to Generation Y, the X Games and the id of a youth detached from ice dancing and curling. What it wrought was the thundering of feet on bleachers, an endless ringing of cowbells and a sport in which snowboarders glide, bump, crash and fly off the mountainside at such exaggerated speeds and heights the whole thing looks like a real life video game.
And in the first Olympic running of "Grand Theft Auto" on ice it was an American who won. Maine's Seth Wescott, the sport's reigning world champion, cut in front of Slovakia's Radoslav Zidek about midway through the final run and then bounced and bopped and weaved his way down the course and over the jumps for the victory. Afterward he laughed because he knew he could just as easily have been left in a pile at the edge of the course when he came around a bend, flew into the air and saw Zidek right below him.
"I wondered if that would have been the end of the race right there," he said.
The 11,000 who packed the snowboarding venue to capacity probably wouldn't have objected if it was, just as long as the crash was spectacular enough to fill the 40-foot television screen next to the course. In an Olympics played before empty seats in Turin and the surrounding mountains — and so far failing to give NBC the ratings bonanza it had hoped for — this little resort town near the French border has become the place to be, the place with the sports everyone is talking about.
"This is what kids do," U.S. snowboarding coach Peter Foley said. "This is what modern people do for sports. This is a natural progression."
One reason may be the format, which requires a lot of races, which means a lot of winners. After two rounds of qualifying, in which 36 riders traveled the course alone, four were eliminated, leaving 32 to be placed in eight brackets of four riders. In subsequent rounds -- the 1/8 finals, the quarterfinals and the semifinals -- the first and second riders advance, the losers move into the consolation bracket. The format means Wescott had to place first or second in three races and win the final run to take the gold medal.
All of those races -- most take less than 90 seconds -- along a 3,000-foot course with 38 features -- jumps, berms, tight turns and gates -- means a lot of jostling for position, so much so that it is fairly common for a rider to hit a wall or skid out of control, often taking another rider with him.
Such accidents don't come without retribution. The best place to watch snowboard cross -- also known as SBX -- is not high in the stands where you can see every twist and turn, but behind the finish area, where the racers go after their runs. Sweden's Mattias Blomberg fired his board into the retaining wall and threw a snowball at his three competitors after he was knocked to the ground in his 1/8 round heat.
That was nothing compared to the rage of U.S. rider Nate Holland, whose medal hopes ended in the quarterfinals when he flew high in the air on one jump, wobbled, then came crashing down behind teammate Jason Smith, who had slowed to make a turn.
"If Jason Smith had gotten his (butt) in gear I wouldn't have wrecked!" Holland shouted as he trudged away from the course.
Later, as Wescott was collecting his gold medal bouquet, Smith said he was surprised to hear Holland was upset.
"When you have guys who are so hyped up about winning and then you get knocked off early you can get mad," he said, and predicted he and Holland would soon be friends again.
Perhaps that optimism is because there is as much love in snowboard cross as there is board-tossing. Men who had just banged into each other and cut one another off on the mountain hugged as they reached the finish line. Blomberg, the angry board-thrower, lingered around the back of the course looking for friends. He spotted Wescott and Paul-Henri Delerue -- who won the bronze -- heading up the mountain for the final race. He pumped his fist and shouted, "Yeah, guys!" Wescott and Delerue pumped their fists in return.
For Wescott, this was the culmination of an Olympic dream that has burned for close to 10 years. He had hoped to make the U.S. snowboarding halfpipe teams in 1998 and 2002 only to fall short and turn his attention to snowboard cross, which was approved as an Olympic sport three years ago.
"Since February of '03 I've been looking to this as the goal that I wanted to accomplish," said Wescott. "So, it's a pretty amazing experience to come here today and actually get that done."
Still, it was the spectacle as much as the riders who made snowboard cross's Olympic debut a success. It seemed as if nearly every rider here had his own cheering section. A devotee of Italian Stefano Pozzolini named Eric Christian Puffo arrived here nearly three hours before the event began, wearing feathers in his hair and green and white and red stripes smeared across his face.
Where Pozzolini goes, Puffo goes. And wherever Puffo goes, the rest of Pozzolini's devotees soon follow, as Toni, Fred, Mauri and Zonta did, clad in a menagerie of outfits including a dog, a leopard and a cow.
"Because inside we are very much an animal," Puffo shouted in broken English, pounding his chest many hours and many drinks after his arrival.
Puffo's heart was broken early as Pozzolini was knocked from medal contention in the 1/8 round heats. He would finish 24th overall.
Nonetheless the mob would not leave. Puffo and his crowd mingled after the day was over, luring Pozzolini over for a picture and then taunting the Delerue fans by chanting over and over and over "Pozzo! Pozzo! Pozzo!"
Security tried to keep the riders' fan clubs from the objects of their idolatry, until eventually it proved a futile task. The mob broke through and there was mayhem everywhere.
Puffo and his men howled.
And an American woman who had little flags painted on her cheek walked away looking dazed.
"I still don't know what those men in the feathers were trying to tell us," she said to her friends.
They shook their heads. Then they laughed.
Everyone did on the day snowboard cross arrived at the Olympics.
