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As a boy, I dreamed of many things, and most of them involved either sports or naked women. Next to becoming a kung fu expert with deadly mind-control skills, my top two fantasies were sleeping with Playboy's 1977 Playmate of the Year, Patti McGuire, and travel-ing the globe in search of the perfect wave with Robert August and Mike Hynson, the legendary surfers from The Endless Summer. Had either scenario come to pass, of course, I would have found myself in the nerve-racking spot of having to demonstrate my prowess, in situ, to masters of their respective athletic endeavors. So when I learned recently that I would be spending several days surfing the point breaks along Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula with the 2006 Olympic snowboardcross gold medalist Seth Wescott—who, I suspected, would prove no slouch on a surfboard, either—I was both thrilled and terrified. What if I wound up look-ing like a tool in front of an all-American hero?
Wescott, the 30-year-old pride of Farmington, Maine, blazed to fame and glory at the Winter Games in Turin last February and put his sport on the map. For those who chose to watch ice dancing instead—and you know who you are—a quick recap is in order.
After twice failing to make the Olympic team as a halfpipe boarder, Wescott jumped from the subjectively judged aerial maneuvering of freestyle to the unambiguous thrill ride of snowboard-cross (SBX to kids and marketers), a crowd-pleasing fusion of downhill racing, Nascar, and roller derby. The premise is simple: Four snowboarders rocket cheek-by-jowl down a serpentine 3,000-foot course, jockeying for position as they carve banked turns and grab major air in a race to the finish line. Heading into Turin with seven X Games medals and the 2005 World Cup SBX title under his belt, Wescott seemed poised to take the gold in the sport's Olympic debut. It al-most didn't happen.
In the final, Wescott, who specializes in come-from-behind nail-biters, put on quite a show: Trailing Radoslav Zidek for most of the race, he barely missed landing on the Slovakian boarder's head after a jump and then zipped past him on a tight right turn for a thrilling victory by half a board length. For good measure, he wrapped himself in the American flag that had once decorated his World War II?veteran grandfather's casket. The next thing Wescott knew, he was ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, appearing on the Today show, racking up endorsements, signing copies of his Sports Illustrated cover, and hearing from emotional fans that they would remember his Olympic moment for the rest of their lives.
"It's been a really humbling—and bizarre—experience to see how something I did could affect people so deeply," Wescott says. "I understand that the Olympics is, you know, the Olympics, but at the same time, it's just another way for me to have fun on my snowboard."
For Wescott, having fun keeps the stoke alive, and fun means big-mountain heli-boarding. When he's not competing or training, he spends most of his time traveling the globe looking for new peaks to descend, in a kind of Endless Winter. Not long ago, Wescott's wandering brought him, as it has for the past four years, to southern Alaska's pristine and forbidding Chugach Mountains, where he gets dropped by helicopter onto rarely trod peaks so he can carve long, graceful turns down their impossibly steep faces. "It's the only place in the world where I've ever experienced complete silence," he says. "No voices, no motors, not even the sound of wind. It's a silence that can be almost deafening, and a little scary—the silence of a void."
