2006 Olympics: You're Golden, Dude!

Sometimes, it helps to roll into the Olympics utterly oblivious to the Games' gravitas, a weight largely manufactured by sponsors and NBC. Sometimes, it helps to just chill. And have a wicked good time. Case in point: the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team, rad and rippin', which bagged three titles last week in the pristine Alpine town of Bardonecchia, 60 miles northwest of Torino. It was a dominating performance that accounted for nearly half the country's total golden hardware.

Yet the U.S.'s two top women half-pipe snowboarders almost missed their final runs--the most important moment of their athletic lives--because they had crept away to an off-limits slope to sneak in some extra rides. Hannah Teter, 19, and Gretchen Bleiler, 24, returned in time to take home gold and silver, respectively. In the finals of the snowboard cross, a new, Roller-Derby-on-snow Olympic event in which four boarders twist and fly down a mountain to the finish, favorite Seth Wescott, 29, should have panicked, trailing Slovakia's Radoslav Zidek late in the race. (It's the Olympics, don't you know?) He didn't and cut off Zidek like a Torino taxi driver to win by one of the whiskers on his chin.

Pressure, what pressure? Shaun White, 19, the Michael Jordan of the half-pipe (the 16-ft.-deep mountainside trench in which snowboarders do their tricks), muffed a landing on his first qualifying run, a potential knockout blow that would have shocked his sport. But only a blizzard could keep that shaggy red mane off the podium. To clear his head, the "Flying Tomato" took a few easy rides with his coach between turns and then rocked the rest of the field when he got back in the pipe.

Snowboarding's carefree psyche does have its faults. For instance, it might actually help to pay attention to the competition. Snowboard crosser Lindsey Jacobellis was cruising last week to the team's fourth straight snowboard gold, which would have given the U.S. a clean sweep. Her lead was so big she could have snowshoed to the finish. But on the second- to-last jump she hot-dogged it, clutching the rail of her board in mid-air, and botched the landing so badly she fell and got silver instead. Going for show is totally in keeping with the snowboard m.o., except that in cross, style points are less useful than euros in Cleveland. It's a race. At first Jacobellis insisted she made the grab for balance, but later in the day, she started to fess up. "I wanted to share with the crowd my enthusiasm," she says. "I messed up."

Goofy or not, the shredders, long the muskrats of the mountain to the stately Alpine skiers, saved American pride on the snow during the first week of the Olympics. Bode Miller proved better on the dance floor than the slopes, finishing a disappointing fifth in the downhill, getting disqualified in the combined after taking the lead and not finishing the super-G. Lindsey Kildow wishboned her skis during a terrifying practice-run crash in the women's downhill and was air-lifted to a hospital in Torino. Miraculously, she raced two days later but finished eighth. Only the surprise winner of the combined slalom-downhill event, Ted Ligety, sparked the U.S. ski team, which had labeled itself "Best in the World." Don't tell that to the Austrians, who won five Alpine ski medals going into the second week of the Games.