Un-Bike related ponderings

Gotta love the Winter Olympics, and more importantly Snow sports in general, and even more specifically, Snow Boarding. I can almost identify with the singlespeed 29er crowd in mountain biking, as boarding always seemed to me, to be the "fringe" outcasts doing their own thing and re-inventing how to ride the snow. Big pants, big coats, big risks, hiding behind gangsta bandanas and the obligatory Oakley's, throwing themselves off cliffs just for the flight time and basically living large. As boarding becomes "mainstream" (forgive me for using that term because I'm employed to do just that every weekend) theres a part of me that would like to hold on to its origins. A little childish I know, but seeing boarders in tight sponsor laden spandex is akin to watching a NASCAR driver change hats six times during the victory interview *YUCK* Case in point is Lindsay Jacobellis, I'll let you google that one cause the first thing you're gonna read is how she showboated herself out of a gold medal in '06 while heading to the finish line. If you saw her DQ last night out of the medal round, I couldn't help but feel extremely sad for her cause the first thing thrown in her face is the 06 fiasco. I'll make a bet that some of her most vehement critics have NEVER ratcheted a set of bindings to their boot and made one F***KING turn on a board let alone raced one against the best in the world. I would have jumped from the couch in tears of joy had she won, styled it with a grab and given the media two fist fulls of middle finger while sliding across the line. A small and not too subtle reminder that just because boarding has made it all the way to the Olympics does NOT mean its nearly as civilized and tame as its apres ski cousins sipping a 1996 Bordeaux bistro style slopeside. Maybe 2014 for Lindsay, maybe never, maybe it really doesn't matter. She'll still be riding while all the couch surfing potato's sneer at what they'll never understand. Its not about them.