Yes, in case you were wondering, snowboarders are a different breed.
After he rode through the pain of a broken rib to snag his bronze medal, Mark McMorris described his tattoo to me: a skull with a stalk of Saskatchewan wheat coming out of its mouth. He’s from Regina after all.
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Half pipe specialist Katie Tsuyuki of Toronto has a trick named after a sushi roll, in honour of her Japanese heritage.
And Crispin Lipscomb finished his interview with me by putting his hands together and bowing Buddhist monk style.
Of all the athletes here you’ll find snowboarders to be some of the most laid back, whimsical and unpretentious of them all.
They’re still elite athletes, but there’s a major dude factor going on here as well.
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You see it a lot in the contrast between snowboarders and the culture of the alpine skiing events.
Speed racers from unpronounceable European cities who seem more like the kind of people you’d meet at the Davos Economic Forum than on a chair lift at Whistler.
Snowboarding is a newer sport, much newer to the Olympics, and what makes it really different is where its DNA comes from.
Remember the last time you saw a bunch of scraggly teenagers skinning their elbows skateboarding down a concrete staircase?
Well that’s where snowboarding comes from — that and surfing.
You see it in the sport’s unique lingo.
They don’t ski, they ride. You don’t enter the half pipe, you drop in.
If you switch your stance from normal to the other way around then you’re riding goofy foot.
It’s a unique, non-conformist subculture with its own rules, codes and taboos.
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Which brings us to the Shaun White issue.
As the most successful snowboarder of all time, the “Flying Tomato” is rumoured to be earning as much or more than the top NHL players who will start playing here shortly.
Take that Sidney Crosby.
White has the best in corporate sponsorship, has trained at half pipes built at secret locations just for him and doesn’t seem to really mix much with the other snowboarders.
In short, he’s a laser-focused athlete and businessman — he’s his own brand.
For the other snowboarders, that seems like a fly in their punch bowl.
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It’s like finding out there was an alternate ending to The Big Lebowski where “The Dude” cuts his hair and goes to work for Goldman Sachs.
When Canadian snowboarders Maxence Parrot and Sébastien Toutant made the first controversy of these Olympics by trash talking White on Twitter, after his decision to pull out of the slopestyle event, they said the reason was that they felt they’d been denied a shot to prove themselves against the world’s best.
They also pointed out White had taken the place of another U.S. boarder who could have come to the Olympics.
I believe them. But you also have to wonder, when you see the body language and the facial expressions whenever White’s name is mentioned, how much of it is about the bigger, culture issue?
It could be that, to them, White isn’t a dude or that he may even be the anti-dude — the dude who doesn’t abide.
But there is another thing that is certain.
If White is the fly in the punch bowl, it must also be recognized that the reason there is even a punch bowl at all is because of White.
Would snowboarding have the profile it enjoys if White hadn’t made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine or had his own video game?
Whether you like his style or not, White is an ambassador and publicity machine that brings more opportunities and dollars to everyone who drops into an Olympic half pipe or dreams of doing so.
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Snowboarding has been good to Canada and it is poised to get even better.
Watching McMorris, Parrot and Toutant spinning head over heels at breakneck speed is one of most thrilling things I’ve ever seen in sport.
You can only imagine how many Canadian kids who are sliding off frozen fences today will be in some future Olympics because of them.
In the bigger picture, the White controversy becomes just background noise in a young sport.
It’s all looking sunny here at Sochi’s Rosa Khutor Extreme Cente: the Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly.
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