If not for extreme sports, Team USA wouldn't be quite so stoked at Sochi Games [View all]

[stopbush]

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia – Following the third podium sweep in United States Winter Olympics history, a group of about half a dozen 20-somethings broke into an impromptu version of the "Star-Spangled Banner." It was awful and beautiful at the same time, an homage to tone-deafness and patriotism. After gold, silver and bronze medals in the new sport of slopestyle skiing, 23-year-old Tom O'Connor and his friends couldn't help themselves.

"We are just dominating these freestyle sports, and I think it's awesome," said O'Connor, from suburban Buffalo. "It's really our sport."

If not for these freestyle sports – or action sports or extreme sports or whatever you want to call them, so long as you call them sports, which, yes, they are – the United States would be Switzerland. It would be Slovenia, population 2 million. It would be a country with four medals, not 12.

Yes, eight of the United States' dozen medals in the Sochi Games have come from slopestyle and halfpipe events. Half their medals didn't even exist four years ago in Vancouver. And three-quarters have come in events introduced since the turn of the millennium.

Depending on one's interpretation, this says a few things about the United States' Olympic program.
1) Team USA is super gnarly. This is unquestionable.

2) Team USA is the beneficiary of events it invented. This, too, is unquestionable.

3) Team USA is awful at everything but the super gnarly events it invented. This is what we soon will learn, and it will give us a far better idea where the United States finishes in the Sochi Games.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/if-not-for-extreme-sports--team-usa-wouldn-t-be-quite-so-stoked-at-sochi-games-175506373.html