Stop treating extreme sport athletes as second-class Olympians

If you’re addicted to sports misery, you can’t just look at the United States’ modest Winter Olympics medal haul thus far. No, that’s not depressing enough. To crank up the anguish to its max, you must turn haughty, create an antiquated tier system to rank the importance of each sport and then surmise that the Americans are even further off relevance’s radar. The arrogant conclusion: If you think it’s bad that the U.S. might finish out of the top five in the medal standings despite having the largest team in Winter Olympics history, it’s worse when you consider it has been buoyed by kiddie-table sports such as snowboarding and freestyle skiing. And that would be a dismissive and primitive way of thinking. These Olympics shouldn’t mystify American traditionalists. If anything, it should force them to accept change, embrace the evolving interests of young athletes and show gratitude that the “extreme sports” have kept our national ego out of intensive care. The supposed daredevil sports have accounted for seven of the country’s 14 medals. Snowboarders have captured four of the six golds. Mikaela Shiffrin was celebrated for her giant slalom gold, but the Alpine skier share the title of most impressive winning performance with shredders Chloe Kim, Red Gerard and Shaun White. And then there’s Jamie Anderson, who won her second straight snowboarding slopestyle gold medal despite winds that could have flown her back home.