It was once seen as a marginal sport espoused by kids in grunge gear, but snowboarding has made this year's Winter Olympics cool. Chief Sports writer Scott Wilson reports.

IT is the abiding memory of the 2006 Winter Olympics. American Lindsey Jacobellis heads to the penultimate jump of the inaugural women's snowboard cross course with the same commanding lead she has held for most of the race.

A routine leap is all she needs to guarantee victory but, instead, she opts to play to the vast Italian crowds. Grabbing her board in mid-flight, Jacobellis attempts a 'hotdog' move that includes a flashy 60-degree twist in front of the grandstands.

It ends in disaster. She crashes to the ground. Switzerland's Tanja Frieden races past to claim gold, and Jacobellis is left with the limited consolation of a silver medal.

In international sport, such blatant showboating is almost unprecedented. In snowboarding, it is just about essential.

"I was having fun," explained a beaming Jacobellis, some two or three hours after an experience that should have been the worst of her life. "Snowboarding is fun and I was ahead. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the crowd. I messed up - oh well, it happens."

Typically showy, typically snowboarding. Such unabashed extravagance is the reason why the sport has been the unexpected success story of this year's winter games. It also explains why it was America's fastest growing sport throughout the 1990s and why it now accounts for more than a fifth of a UK winter sports market worth more than £1.2m.

In 1986, almost all leading Alpine resorts banned snowboarding from their slopes. Ten years later, and only three per cent were open solely to skiers.

The speed of the sport's growth is also in evidence closer to home. Eight years ago, Sunderland Ski Centre in Silksworth did not run a single snowboarding course. Today, the artificial slope hosts four specialist snowboarding sessions a week and caters for private tutoring every day it is open. A sport that was once seen as marginal has arrived in the mainstream.

'The growth of snowboarding really began in the 1980s," explains Bethony Garner, a spokesperson for the Ski Club of Great Britain, an umbrella organisation that represents 30,000 ski and snowboard members. "But it was the mid to late 1990s when the sport really took off.

"At first, it appealed to a completely different demographic to skiing and it was seen as edgy and cool. The initial growth was really through word of mouth but things have progressed quickly since then.

"In the last two or three years, the sport has started to plateau a bit. It is massively popular now and is probably as well known as skiing."

Yet it continues to cling to its outsider status. To understand the culture that still drives the sport, it is important to consider the environment that spawned its origins.

While its biological father has never been confirmed, snowboarding's birth is generally attributed to Jack Burchett who, in 1929, fashioned a board from a plank of wood, some rope and horse reins for bindings.

As the American counter-culture began to take hold in the 1960s, a generation of youngsters were growing up with rebellion in their blood and snow on their shoes.

But established resorts did not want to know. Skiing's upper-class trustees were less than impressed by a group of badly-dressed, bad mannered upstarts infiltrating their pristine pistes and they drove them from the slopes.

The rebels' response was to take to the boards, no doubt mimicking their West Coast cousins who were developing a surfing culture that paid homage to the Beach Boys.

Snowboarding gained an outlaw reputation and, over the next ten years, the youth media gradually cottoned on to the phenomenon. Punk rock and skater style became easy bedfellows and, as with most cultural explosions, it didn't take long for Europe to follow America's lead.

"Snowboarding and skiing have always been like chalk and cheese," says Matt Walder, a spokesman for Snowboard Club UK, a members' forum that brings together the thousands of British snowboarders who head for the Alpine slopes every winter.

"The distinction is starting to get a bit blurred as skiing gradually adopts the parts of snowboarding culture that made it so distinct in the first place.

"The advent of freestyle skiing has blurred the divide a bit but I don't think it has removed it completely. Snowboarding is still seen to be far more cool and it's seen to reflect a different lifestyle choice to skiing. Part of skiing's image still revolves around family holidays to the slopes and big expensive chalets.

"Snowboarding is about the music and the clothes as much as it is about the slopes. It's about freedom, excitement and danger more than sticking to marked out routes and routines."

But how does the Olympics fit into this mix? If there is one sporting event that represents the establishment in all its bloated, self-reverential glory, it is surely the quadrennial meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

How can snowboarding cling to its outsider status if it is selling its soul to the Olympic cash cow?

At first, that question caused a massive amount of head shaking. When snowboarding was first introduced to the Olympic schedules in Nagano in 1998, one of the sport's leading practitioners, Terje Haakonsen, boycotted the Games citing the corrupt practices of the IOC as his primary motivation.

The influential Snowboarder magazine published an article entitled, "Can We Give The Olympics Back?". To sell out or not to sell out, that was the question.

In the end, the sport has settled for somewhere in between. It has accepted Olympic rules and norms, but imbued them with a characteristically rebellious streak.

This month's Olympic competition has been played out to a musical background provided by DJ Chainsaw. American half-pipe gold medallist Shaun White ripped through his routine to the sounds of AC/DC's Back in Black, while Briton Lesley McKenna's accompaniment (Club Foot by Kasabian and I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor by the Arctic Monkeys) was chosen by listeners to Radio One.

The start of the women's halfpipe was delayed when two competitors, Elena Hight and Gretchen Bleiler, disappeared down an off-limits part of the mountain because the snow looked "really cool". Bleiler still went on to claim the silver medal.

"I don't think you can call the Olympics a sideshow," says Drew Stevenson, the organiser of Ticket To Ride, snowboarding's leading world tour. "Maybe a gnarly circus would be a better metaphor all round.

"My main impression was that the riders, the industry and the core snowboard media thought snowboarding had been hijacked by the dark evil empire of skiing. In truth, I think this feeling was totally justified at the time.

"But, while I totally agreed with what was being said at the time, I think the very public conflict was totally negative for snowboarding as a whole. It made the sport almost untouchable to potential sponsors.

"Sometimes you need to pick your battles to win the war and, in terms of presenting the sport to a broad mainstream brand, I think the Olympics is now highly important."

The success of the 2006 Winter Olympics has already persuaded the British winter sports industry to crown March 4 "Ski and Snowboard Day", with various events and giveaways taking place across the country.

But, as snowboarding continues to grow, so its original raison d'etre continues to be diluted. At the moment, the sport seems to want the best of both worlds. Whether that is possible in the long term remains to be seen.