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It was maybe a year or two after the 1998 Olympic Winter Games, and Ross Rebagliati was still riding a high, as it were, from his gold-medal win in Nagano, Japan.

The Canadian snowboarder was training in Colorado on Copper Mountain. An hour away, in Denver. The Rolling Stones were booked to play at the Pepsi Centre and Rebagliati was invited to the show as a guest of Roots, his main sponsor.

We’ll let Rebagliati pick it up from here: “We had a backstage pass with the band,” he recalls. “And in this room offstage were these Indian tapestries hanging from the wall. And these Afghan rugs. The Stones like them, apparently. And then — how’s this for contrast — there’s this lifesize cutout of Elvis. And in his mouth is a big, fat joint. A real one.

“We’re standing around, and Keith (Richards) comes out and says, ‘Well, we’d better smoke this before the show. Can’t leave this here.’ So we smoke the joint. It was great. We had a real nice conversation.

“Twenty minutes later, I’m in the front row watching The Rolling Stones, watching Keith Richards up there playing the guitar, and Mick Jagger is jumping around and singing, and I’m like, ‘This is amazing.’ I’m stoned, and I know Keith is stoned because we just smoked the same joint.

“It was wild.”

If there’s ever been an athlete so inextricably linked to cannabis, it’s Canada’s B.C. golden boy, Ross Rebagliati.

Think Cheech and Chong on halfpipe (snowboard run, that is).

So isn’t it ironic that exactly 20 years after his gold-medal run on Mount Yakebitai, Rebagliati is looking to capitalize on cannabis legalization, come Oct. 17?

Rebagliati has actually been preparing for this day for some time with Ross’s Gold, a high-end boutique in Kelowna, B.C.

Forget wine. We’re talking cannabis … bongs over merlots.

But as D-Day approaches, when it becomes legal to spark up in public, Rebagliati is rethinking his approach to turning a buck on grass.

Hence the launch of his new brand, Legacy, focusing on retail cannabis products, from organic soil systems, to home-growing cannabis plant kits, to Legacy Bites, a sort of energy bar which has cannabidiol, or CBDs, which Rebagliati says offers pain relief and is a “very powerful” anti-inflammatory.

Legacy, he says, will also be looking at acquiring its own licensed producer of cannabis.

“When you have a licence to produce,” he said, “it gives you other licences like import and export licences, and the ability to purchase from other producers. And, of course, you have the credentials to allow you to sell to the liquor board and get your product out into the various retail outlets.

“We’re planning on having Legacy outlets right around the world, actually.”

Rebagliati admits the whole cannabis thing is part of his legacy — hence the name of his company — and he says he’s proud to wear that as a badge of honour.

He’s been speaking about the benefits of cannabis 20 years now, he says, since back when the subject was hush, hush.

And now, he says, it lends credibility to his latest venture.

“I didn’t just come up with this when legalization came about,” he says. “I was part of the legalization.”