It comes round every four years, and since 1998 it has been a major talking point in the snowboarding community. It is the Winter Olympics.
12 years ago our beloved snowboarding was finally accepted into the Olympics, surely a great thing for the sport and for anyone partcipating in it at either professional or recreational level. In many peoples opinion, it is not so great, and there you have the grounds for an argument.

Prior to it's acceptance into the olympic games, the ski world turned their noses up at it like lords towards peasants, brushing it off like snow on their fur collared ski suit. Suddenly, snowboarding could no longer be passed off as a fad, a craze, or any other excuse they wanted to come up with. Snowboarding was here to stay and was officially a winter sport.

The first snowboarding event of the winter olympics was not without controversy. Before the games even began, it had kicked up a storm like no other in the history of snowboarding. Terje Hakonsen immediately made his stance clear by publicly declaring that he would not have any part of it, claiming that, "snowboarding is not a discipline of skiing." This may be true, but neither is bob-sleigh or curling. The inclusion of a wider range of sports reflects the olympic games in the modern world. It is no longer just skiing. Winter activities have evolved, producing many weird and wonderful inventions. The snowboard simply takes the snow sliding properties of the ski, and the sideways motion of a skateboard or surf board. I don't care if your name is Terje, you can't claim that the snowboard was not born without at least a few squirts of ski sperm.
The controversy continued when winner Ross Rebagliati had his gold medal taken away after testing positive for marajuana. "It is not a performance enhancing drug" echoed around the globe from snowboarders in his defence. Again, the arrogance of the snowboard world was almost embarrasing. It is commonly known that to snowboard with confidence and style, a rider needs to be relaxed. It is also commonly known that marajuana helps relax the body. Not performance enhancing?
It is no secret that the smoking of cannabis goes with snowboarding like drinking beer goes with rugby. Whether this is a good or bad thing is another argument, but the Olympics must be a drug free event.

Twelve years on, snowboarding has remained an Olympic sport and indeed now includes boardercross as well as halfpipe. This year especially, the snowboarders seem to have bemused 95% of television viewers with their baggy clothes, headphones, and easy going attitude. The snowboarding events definitely stand out from all the other events. Viewers of the BBC's coverage are sending in e-mails asking questions like "Why don't the snowboarders wear lycra suits to be more streamlined?" Not such a ridiculous suggestion perhaps, but one which I'm sure will have any snowboarder reading this article chuckle to themselves just as I did when I heard Sue Barker read the e-mail out on national TV. This just demonstrates the lack of understanding in the mainstream of what snowboarding is all about, and certainly gives fuel to the argument that it should perhaps not be categorised along with skiing and the other sports as an olympic event. Personally I do not share this point of view. It is the reluctance of riders to let snowboarding become more 'mainstream' that makes it so difficult for professional riders to make a decent living out of the sport. A statement I hear frequently repeated by snowboarders the world over is, "Snowboarding is not a sport, it's a lifestyle." Again, this is a somewhat arrogant point of view. I am sure as David Beckham drives his Ferrari through the busy streets of Madrid, arriving at his Spanish mansion, before making love to his ex-pop star wife, he would claim that football is not a sport, it is a lifestyle. The fact is that any sport has a lifestyle that goes with it, and the more you participate in the sport, the more you will slip into that certain lifestyle. The trouble with snowboarding is that the lifestyle is that of spending seasons in resorts interacting mainly with other snowboarders. It is its own little world. This is why most people fail to comprehend the values, styles, and dress sense of snowboarders in the Olympics, and it is also why many snowboarders adopt a very arrogant attitude towards snowboarding and it's inclusion in the so called 'mainstream'.

So should snowboarding be in the Olympics? You only need to see the smiles on the faces of Shaun White or Hanah Teter as they completed their winning halfpipe runs, or the boardcross riders gleaming with smiles even as they battle aggressively through berms on the snowcross course. So maybe people don't understand, but that just goes to show that even in the Olympics, snowboarding can remain individual and definitely unique.

Editorial : Andrew Winter
Photos : Reuters