Snowboarders everywhere must be doing Haakon flips over the Olympic success of their once disdained sport.
Two gold medals, one silver and two bronze, including a sweep of the men's halfpipe contest, at the 2002 Winter Games cast "shredding" into the most positive limelight of its short history. People who didn't know a halfpipe from a drain pipe are raving. Snowboarding even captivated LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley.
"That halfpipe thing! I've never seen it before. Oh! I just enjoyed it," he told USA Today this week.
The 91-year-old leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints caught last Monday's contest on television.
"It was crazy, to get down and tip upside down and cavort about," he said.
There was a time when ski resorts and skiers frowned upon those cavorting about on snowboards. Some still do.
"When I started there was one run on the local mountain where you could go up and you had to ride well enough to get certified to go on the other runs. A lot of mountains banned snowboarding, and skiers looked down on snowboarding," said Ross Powers, a 23-year-old Vermont native whose soaring, twisting tricks earned him an Olympic halfpipe gold medal.
Burton Snowboards founder Jake Burton, who quit his job as Wall Street stockbroker 25 years ago to form what has become a global enterprise, attended the Olympic snowboarding events last week. He couldn't help but juxtapose Park City Mountain Resort with neighboring Deer Valley, which doesn't permit snowboarding.
"It's embarrassing more than anything else," Burton said. "It's just a form of age discrimination. That's the frustrating part."
Lots of genXers ? even a few baby boomers ? have taken up snowboarding the past few years. It's the fastest growing winter sport in the world. Kids today aren't telling their parents they want to ski like Picabo Street. They're saying they want to throw McTwists (a 540-degree inverted aerial) and Haakon flips (an inverted 720-degree spin) in the halfpipe.
"It's just (that) snowboarding is so right," says Burton, 47, who rides more than 100 days a year.
There are still a handful of resorts nationwide that don't see it that way, Deer Valley and Alta being the only two in Utah.
Kip Pitou, president of Ski Utah, figures that will change someday.
"My feeling is they eventually will (allow snowboarding), probably Alta first then Deer Valley," he said.
Pitou noted that lift ticket sales for skiing are flat, while they are on the rise for snowboarding. Nationally, snowboarders buy about 20 percent of all lift tickets. Resorts that want to grow their business and change their stodgy images will have to adapt, he said.
But managers at Deer Valley and Alta say they are comfortable with their places in the two-plank world. Although they found the Olympic snowboard competition thrilling, they say it won't have any influence on future business decisions.
Coleen Reardon, Deer Valley marketing director, said the resort has done well financially the past five years and bases much of what it does on customer surveys. There's no clamor for snowboards.
"It seems like we have found a niche," she said.
Ditto at Alta, whose reasonable lift ticket prices cater to local skiers. "We're kind of proud of what we have here," public relations director Connie Marshall said.
Marshall, though, did concede "things go on, times do change."
E-mail: romboy@desnews.com