The Dew Tour returns to Breckenridge Dec. 13-16, bringing with it some of the world’s best boarders and skiers.

I’m talking Colorado Olympians Red Gerard, Alex Ferreira, Gus Kenworthy, Arielle Gold and Birk Irving (youth Olympian). There are plenty of great non-Coloradans, too, I guess. (I’m looking at you, Chloe Kim, Danny Davis, Julia Marino, Ben Ferguson, Jamie Anderson and Spencer O’Brien).

Women’s ski and team ski competitions will be held Thursday, Dec. 13. The women’s ski modified superpipe final will take place Friday morning, followed by women’s snowboarding and team snowboarding. Men’s ski will be Saturday. Sunday will host the finals for men’s ski modified superpipe, men’s snowboarding jump and jib, and women’s snowboarding modified superpipe. A full schedule is available at .

The Motet will headline the Saturday night concert, where tickets range $40-$500 at Riverwalk Center in downtown Breckenridge.

The Dew Tour is (as always) free. Dec. 13, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Dec. 14-16, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. The concert is Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Riverwalk Center in downtown Breckenridge and tickets range $40-$500 and can be purchased at .

Snowboarding

Skiing and hot dogs will be free for the day, and there will be a bake sale benefiting the Howelsen Hill Endowment Fund. Coaches with the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, formed in 1914, will conduct a learn-to-jump session on the beginner ski jumps. Howelsen has the only major ski jumps in Colorado and has hosted Nordic combined World Cup events on them.

Norwegian immigrant Carl Howelsen built the first ski jump on the hill that bears his name in 1914, having previously put on ski jumping exhibitions for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as “the Flying Norseman.” Steamboat produced its first Olympian, ski jumper John Steele, in 1932. Since then it has produced 90 more including Arielle Gold, who won a bronze medal in snowboard halfpipe at the PyeongChang Games. Five other Steamboat athletes competed there last month.

More than 20 members of the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame got their starts at Howelsen, and the upper floor of the lodge, called Olympian Hall, is decorated with flags representing every Olympian the hill has produced.

The Howelsen complex, located across the river from downtown Steamboat three miles from the Steamboat Ski Area, has a vertical drop of only 440 feet with one chairlift serving 16 alpine trails — there are 12 miles of cross country trails, too — but Howelsen’s place in Colorado skiing history is huge. It is currently hosting the NCAA ski championships, which began Wednesday and conclude Saturday.

After Sunday, the alpine slopes will close to the public for the season but will host several upcoming competitive events including regional under-14 championships. The nordic trails will remain open and groomed daily through March 18.

By The Numbers

9

Number of medals won by Coloradans.

39%

Percentage of Team USA’s medals that were won by Coloradans.

Colorado Olympians who won Olympic medals in PyeongChang

MIKAELA SHIFFRIN

The 22-year-old EagleVail skier was the big winner of the Games for Colorado — she took home gold in the giant slalom and won a silver medal in the alpine combined. Despite her two medals, she was disappointed to miss out on a repeat victory in the slalom, an event in which she was heavily favored. “Every single loss that I’ve ever had, I remember that feeling — ugh — so thoroughly,” Shiffrin said of her disappointment. “It����ap like a piece of my heart breaks off and I can never get it back.”

RED GERARD

The 17-year-old from Silverthorne — fresh off a late night Netflix binge-watching session — won the first gold medal for the U.S. during the PyeongChang Games, putting together an amazing final run in the snowboard slopestyle. Gerard became a huge hit, appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and having in his honor.

NICOLE HENSLEY

The 23-year-old goaltender was a member of the Team USA’s gold-medal winning hockey team, that defeated Canada to with the first U.S. hockey gold in 20 years. Hensley shut out the Olympic athletes from Russia early in the tournament — and the images on her goalie mask became a talking point. However, the Lakewood native and Green Mountain High School grad did not get the start in the gold medal game.

ALEX FERREIRA

The 23-year-old halfpipe skier from Aspen claimed the silver medal — although it took a massive performance from fellow American David Wise to edge him out for gold. During the event, Alex’s father, Marcelo Ferreira, recruited 50 school children from Seoul to sing and dance for his son in a magical moment in Phoenix Park.

LAUREN GIBBS

In one of the most unlikely Olympic stories, Gibbs was discovered four years ago working out at a Denver gym. A friend told her she’d be good at the bobsled. Turns out Gibbs was great, as she earned a silver medal in the two-person bobsled, along with teammate Elana Meyers Taylor.

KYLE MACK

The 20-year-old first-time Olympian snowboarder from Silverthorne won the silver medal in the Big Air competition — the second medal of the Games for the town of Silverthorne. And he did it be pulling off an incredible front side 1440 one-of-a-kind bloody Dracula grab.

ARIELLE GOLD

It was a comeback story for Arielle Gold, the Steamboat Springs snowboarder, who won a bronze medal in the halfpipe. The 21-year-old Gold — a.k.a. the biggest Broncos fan at the Olympics — nearly quit snowboarding after suffering an injury during practice for the Sochi Games.

LINDSEY VONN

After one bobble cost her a medal in the super-G, the 33-year-old Vail skier won the bronze medal in what could be her final Olympic downhill race. The medal was some vindication for Vonn, who had been heckled by internet trolls in the lead-up to the Olympics. After her races, Vonn scattered her grandfathers ashes near the downhill course. After the Games, not everyone was convinced Vonn’s Olympic career is over.

The No. 1 sport of the Games is dream-weaving. In the 21st century, the original Olympic motto of “citius, altius, fortius” has been transformed to world peace, fair play, enduring legacy.

It����ap all a grand illusion.

The U.S. Army chaplain stood at the top of Olympic grandstands, bitter cold buffeting his face, mucus dripping from his nose. But Tom Helms was on a mission. He and his son unfurled an American flag, the stars and stripes, big and beautiful and 15 feet wide. Helms was not only showing the colors, but sending a message to Kim Jung-un and North Korea, whose border was 60 miles away from the ski venue at Yongpyong Ski Resort.

“The Olympics are an incredible opportunity for athletes from around the world to participate in freedom,” said Helms, stationed at Camp Humphreys near the city of Pyeongtaek in central South Korea. “It����ap my great hope that everybody that comes to the Olympics, including the athletes and cheerleaders from North Korea, can all breathe free air down here.”

Competitors from the United States and Russia exchange fist bumps at the finish line. But, in the crowd, there’s a whole lot of passionate flag-waving. Maybe nothing else more concisely illustrates that the Winter Olympics are incapable of changing the world. For 17 days, the most the Games can do is put the world’s problems on hold.

The roar of the crowd at the Final Four or Super Bowl might be louder, but there’s no bigger sports thrill than an Olympic thrill. It was pure goose bumps when Ester Ledecka, the Czech snowboarder trained by a coach from Steamboat, crossed the finish line on borrowed skis in the super-G, peered at the scoreboard and saw her name next to a big, red No. 1.

She thought the result was certainly a mistake. But the magic was real. A snowboarder had beaten the world’s best skiers at their own game. What����ap more, on Saturday, I watched Ledecka complete what might be the most unlikely double in Olympic history, finishing first in parallel giant slalom on her board without ever being seriously challenged.

Before departing the Games with more gold than Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn combined, Ledecka endorsed this tweet: “Austria: We are the best in super-G! Swiss: No, we are the best! USA: Shut up, we are the best! Italia: Mamma mia! Ledecka: Hold my beer … and my snowboard.”

When athletes from the two Koreas marched together under the same flag during opening ceremonies, there were tears of joy. Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korean, sold the Games as a new chance for dialogue and reconciliation.

Ask anyone with a meaningful history on the Korean peninsula, and talk of unification is often met with a skeptical eye roll.

“I have been to the Congo and many countries were bad, very bad, but when I went to North Korea in 1996, it was almost impossible to comprehend the conditions that the people live under,” said Christian Wyss, a Swiss photographer. “After the photos I took were published, North Korea called me. I was told I could never return to that country, unless I wanted to be killed.”

The politics of North and South make reunification seem a bridge too far. But deciding who’s in charge wouldn’t be nearly the biggest challenge in melding the two countries.

“The topic of unification is a loaded one, because it is so complicated. I think in our deepest desires, all Koreans want eventual unification,” said Tommy Im, a proud Korean that lives in Denver.

“But practically, I think the vast majority of South Koreans do not want unification, given the immense costs, socially, culturally and economically, which would be the burden of integrating North Korea into the 21st century. I think unification is on the horizon. A peaceful and gradual unification is ideal, but both Koreas are so apart in their approach to government, foreign policy and capitalism, given each country’s unique history since World War II. What cannot be ignored, however, is North Korea’s record on human rights. Atrocities are committed every day, atrocities comparable to Nazi Germany.”

Snowboarder Vic Wild grew up in White Salmon, Wash., and competed in the 2010 Winter Games for the United States. A year later, frustrated by the lack of funding for his sport and in love, he moved to Russia, married Olympic athlete Alena Zavarzina, renounced his U.S. citizenship and won two gold medals representing Russia at the 2014 Sochi Games.

Although clean, Wild got slimed by the doping scandal that engulfed the Russian Olympic program, and was uncertain he would be allowed to compete in PyeongChang until a week prior to the opening ceremony.

“That definitely put some gray hairs on my head,” Wild said Saturday, after getting eliminated from medal contention in an early heat of parallel giant slalom.

When he visits the United States, people in his home town crack jokes at the expense of the American that crossed over to Vladimir Putin’s side. The the buy-the-world-a-Coke spirit of the Games can fizzle quickly. When Wild repeatedly reached out to the International Olympic Committee to clear his name of doping suspicions during the past 18 months, he could not even get any official to return his phone calls.

“It hurts the Olympic spirit,” Wild said. “I feel like I’ve got the Olympics’ back. And they don’t have my back … It kind of makes me feel like I’m, in a sense, just another unit for them to create profits off. I don’t know. That����ap kind of harsh to say. It just feels like that. I wouldn’t say that����ap true. At least it feels that way.”

While the Olympics purport to put athletes first, it seems to Wild that too often there’s actually an adversarial relationship between the IOC and the skiers, snowboarders and skaters that put on the show at the Winter Games.

“I think all (Olympic) athletes should create a union, like in football, baseball and basketball,” Wild said. “We should all work together. I think there’s a lot of profit going on here that doesn’t make it to the people that need it.”

South Korea is nothing short of a technological wonder, backed by a resilient heart. On a peninsula torn apart by some of the strongest geopolitical forces on earth, this country of 51 million people is the home to skiing robots and Mensa-level smart phones and automobiles that now rival anything manufactured in arch-rival Japan.

Here’s the definition of unlimited ambition: South Korea brought the Winter Olympics to a place with no snow. Yes, when the wind howls in PyeongChang, it feels like Siberia. Winter here is not only harsh, it����ap arid. More than 90 percent of the snow in every venue, from the snowboard halfpipe to the cross-country course, was man-made, not God-made. That might make for a hard, uniform surface for the competitors, but it stinks for the growth of a winter sports culture.

The truth is, South Korea constructed winter for television. And, if you ask me, it felt all wrong. The song that opened the local TV broadcast of action from the Games was often “All the Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers, with Brandon Flowers crooning: “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier.”

It pains me to say it, but these were the Winter Games without soul. The hosts were friendly and efficient. Those stuffed white tigers were beyond cute.

But on the night I went to the medals plaza, when Colorado snowboarder Arielle Gold went to collect her bronze, it had all the ambiance of picking up a lawnmower from the customer-service desk at Home Depot. At Phoenix Snow Park, where snowboarder Red Gerard from Silverthorne was golden, owners of local ski shops were outraged because the resort was shut down for Games in mid-Januray and won’t open again until next season. The $75 million stadium built for the opening and closing ceremonies will be torn down, which I guess is better than letting an Olympic venue rot, as we have seen happen in Brazil.

While eating a bowl of barbecue beef and rice in a local diner, I struck up a conversation with Reto Rey, who wasn’t certain if he was supposed to order food at the counter or cool his jets until a waiter arrived. Rey was visiting PyeongChang on a scouting mission, as a representative of Sion, Switzerland, which is considering a bid for the 2026 Games.

How can you have the Winter Olympics in a place where there is no snow and people don’t like skiing? “The Olympics has to get back to its roots,” Rey said.

For the Games to be a true celebration of winter, the IOC can’t award the Olympics to anyplace with a spare $10 or $50 billion to build a gigantic plastic snow globe.

Nevertheless, the next Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing, which makes about as much sense as going to an Italian restaurant and eating a burrito. Or as Chris Knight, the coach of Lindsey Vonn, so succinctly put it: “They haven’t even built the Olympic ski venues in China.”

World peace, fair play, enduring legacy.

Those are lofty, laudable goals.

First, the Winter Olympics might try fixing the Winter Olympics.

After each contest, athlete accolades rained on the pipe builders, a three-man team that includes Copper Mountain snow sculptors Mark Pevny and Jake Ingle. Shaun White, Chloe Kim and David Wise all heralded the super-sized halfpipe that enabled them to win in what turned out to be America’s best gold mine of these Olympics.

“It really allowed the riders to put together a run that maybe they envisioned but haven’t been able to do,” said 33-year-old Pevny of Denver, who spends his winters building and maintaining the pipe at Copper Mountain. “We wanted to give them a platform that was a long enough, wide enough and steep enough pipe for them to be able to make these the best comps ever.”

Pevny, Ingle and their Austrian pipe-cutting partner Alli Zehetner spent more than a month at the Phoenix Park resort in South Korea’s mountainous PyeongChang County, directing a team of 70 Koreans in building the pipe. Zehetner, who built the slopestyle venue for the Sochi Olympics and is in charge of the parks at Austria’s Kitzsteinhorn resort, as well as several World Cup halfpipes, handled the cutting for the snowboard contests. Ingle was in charge of the pipe for the ski contests, captaining the GPS-guided PistenBully snow groomer mounted with the Swiss-made Zaugg pipe groomer known as the “Pipe Monster.” Pevny handled the grooming of the bottom of the pipe.

Their finesse at the controls of the machine was surgical. The slightest mistake — shaving too little, leaving too much on the walls, mulching the snow in the trough or rutting the transitions — could endanger athletes who launch 20-plus feet above the 22-foot walls. A few millimeters of over-vertical or under-vertical on the wall can alter a soaring body’s trajectory with dire consequences.

“Every second, we are thinking about perfection,” Zehetner said. “We know every inch of this halfpipe.”

“Sure, every snowflake was meticulously placed in the right place,” said a laughing Ingle, a Michigan resident who built Copper Mountain’s first halfpipe in the late 1990s and now travels the country building the Grand Prix halfpipes that host the world’s top skiers and snowboarders.

Colorado is the birthplace of the 22-foot Olympic-caliber halfpipe and now boasts one of the world’s highest concentrations of the superpipes at Buttermilk, Snowmass, Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Vail. The technology for carving Olympic halfpipes came from Colorado. Farmer Doug Waugh crafted the first-ever pipe-carving machine in 1991, tweaking his farm machinery to create an arced arm of spinning augers and shovels that attached to a snowcat.  called his machine the Pipe Dragon, and it was used to carve halfpipes at the Nagano Games in 1998 and the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.

Zehetner is quick to say his team played only a role in the successes in the PyeongChang Olympic pipe. There were many other contributors, including good weather and athletes, ready to send it.

“The whole package needs to be when everything works together — to the athletes feeling it����ap their day when they get up in the morning and also the weather is a big part,” said the 41-year-old Zehetner. “We can influence one little part of it. Only when all these components come together, then it is an outcome like this.”

The trio made the pipe longer after Olympic test-event competitions last year. Athletes at those events asked them for extra space, so they added another 100 feet or so. It’s also steeper than most pipes, with a pitch of 18.3 degrees, compared with Copper’s pipe at 17.25 degrees and Mammoth’s at 18 degrees.

“This was, hands down, the very best pipe we have ever had built for us,” said U.S. Freeskiing halfpipe coach Ben Verge, whose athletes David Wise, Alex Ferreria and Brita Sigourney earned medals.

On most pipes, the highest-flying athletes quickly run out of room and can squeeze in only four hits. The Olympic pipe enabled five, even six hits.

“Since our guys are always working for more amplitude, the length is really nice to have for them,” said U.S. pipe coach Andy Woods.

Pevny, Ingle and Zehetner felt the pressure for perfection after the halfpipe debacle in Sochi four years ago, where a poorly maintained pipe did not enable high-level riding. That was not the case this time around.

“We were watching these guys build, build and build to this moment. So it was cool to see them have something where they could progress even more,” said Ingle, a snowboarder and a graduate of a ski area management program who was an intern at Copper Mountain in the late 1990s when he started building the resort����ap first halfpipe. “It����ap just cool to showcase the sport on the biggest stage possible and let the athletes do the runs they set out to do and push the sport.”

“It really all started to fall apart right after the last Olympics in Sochi,” said the 21-year-old from Steamboat Springs, whose bronze medal last week in the PyeongChang Olympic halfpipe capped a fairy-tale comeback to the top of a sport she was ready to quit not even a year ago.

It was more than that injury — which lingers today, including dislocating her shoulder during practice a day before her bronze-medal performance — that almost pushed her off her board for good.

Snowboarding was in a downhill slide in 2015, part of a decline since peaking in 2010 after more than a decade of spectacular growth. Participation numbers were dropping, down more than half-a-million participants between 2010 and 2015, according to . Equipment sales were withering, with sales of snowboards declining $60 million a year since 2007. Snowboarders were aging and riding less. Warmer winters were pinching powder days.

And snowboard makers started tightening their budgets.

The days of pro snowboarders making bank were over. Even for Olympians.

Gold was rehabbing her shoulder in 2014 when she found out she would not be re-signing with her sponsor, Red Bull. Burton, the snowboard maker who had supported her rapid ascent through the ranks and once heralded her as the heir apparent of snowboarding pioneer Kelly Clark’s crown, also pulled away.

“It was a tough pill to swallow, losing all the support I had growing up. That made me less inclined to keep snowboarding,” Gold said. “I felt like I had lost faith in myself and the entire industry had lost faith in me.”

She appeared to be the next big thing in snowboarding in 2012, when at age 15, she won a gold medal in the junior world championships. A year later, she was the second-youngest rider to ever win a world championship. She followed that with bronze at her first Winter X Games in 2013, joining the show as a last-minute alternate. Then she became the youngest athlete on U.S. Snowboarding’s 2014 Olympic halfpipe team. She was 17 and relishing the dream.

Out of nowhere, a spry 14-year-old girl arrived on the scene and suddenly Gold was not so golden. Chloe Kim took the snowboarding world by storm, spinning the biggest, most technical tricks ever seen in women’s halfpipe. In a matter of months, if there were athlete sponsor dollars flowing into snowboarding, they were going to the happy California teenager who was too young to compete in the Sochi Olympics. But she was more than ready for PyeongChang, where she cruised to a gold medal in a stellar display of athleticism that is unrivaled in women’s riding.

As the Kim phenomenon unfolded, Gold was caught between two groups of snowboarders. The old guard — like Kelly Clark, Gretchen Bleiler, Hannah Teter and Elana Hight — had thrived for years without having to win every contest, riding the wave of snowboarding’s soaring ascent. Today, if you aren’t Shaun White or Chloe Kim — the best halfpipe snowboarders in history — you aren’t getting rich as a competitive pipe snowboarder.

Even if you win a medal in the Olympics.

“She’s like a sneeze in the wind between two tornadoes. That����ap been the story for a while,” said Ken Gold, Arielle’s father, making sure to point out that his daughter has never once complained about her career arc in the shadow of giants.

Gold and Kim are close. Without Kim pushing, it����ap not likely Gold would have battled to learn new tricks — like the daunting 1080 — that earned her bronze last week.

Ken anguished as he saw his daughter struggle after Sochi. As sponsors left, he watched her flounder in the pipe. Her riding didn’t have that spark that once impressed everyone.

“It was a tough four years for her. Physically, emotionally, mentally. And not much out there to encourage her,” Ken said.

Gold started to question her career choices. She started school full-time at the University of Colorado, studying to become a veterinarian. She spent more time with her horses. She fostered rescue dogs, a passion she found after seeing all the strays around Sochi, Russia. She was ready to walk away from competitive snowboarding. In a sport where young athletes like Kim and the promising Maddie Mastro work full-time on snowboarding, a rider who is distracted by responsibilities such as school and a grown-up life can’t keep up with the breakthrough tricks. Even athletes who spend half a year recovering from an injury struggle to catch up. That’s the pace of progression in women’s snowboarding today.

The 2016-17 season was the worst. Gold couldn’t find podiums. She wasn’t landing her runs. She was scared of hurting herself again, surprised by a paralyzing fear of tricks she’d been throwing for several years.

“I was wondering if I was burned out and wondering if I could even have fun snowboarding,” she said.

On the advice of a friend, she called a sports psychologist. The counselor told her to make a choice: snowboard or don’t. And be happy with that call.

She made the decision and rededicated herself to her board. At the first contest of the season last December, the Olympic qualifier at Copper Mountain, she felt a spark. The next week at the Dew Tour, it was a fire. By the end of the season, at the Aspen X Games, just before she left for South Korea, she was raging, throwing big 1080s and shining as bright as ever. The Gold glow was back.

At the Aspen X Games in late January, she fell on nearly every trick during practice. That����ap the kind of thing that used to get in her head. Not anymore. She went on to win silver, stomping what was the best run of her life before she upped her game in the PyeongChang pipe.

“It used to be so much of my time was spent looking over my shoulder at what the other girls were doing. But now this season, it����ap been so much more about what I want to do in each contest. I don’t even watch any more,” she said.

U.S. Snowboarding coach Ricky Bower has seen a lot of comebacks over his many years in the halfpipe.

Gold’s, he said, is number one in his book.

“The best turnaround I’ve ever seen,” he said.

After she struggled through team training camps in California, New Zealand and Austria last fall, Bowers told Gold her challenges weren’t physical. After she worked with her sports psychologist, he was floored with how quickly she came around.

“She showed what����ap possible to have happen when she addressed the mental side of things,” Bower said.

When these top-tier athletes in the pipe reach a certain level of technical expertise, the game becomes largely mental, Bower said.

“To see Arielle get on the podium with a medal was the most special moment for me, maybe of any Olympics,” Bower said. “It����ap was the sweetest moment for me. To see her come into this year with her level of poise of focus was just so special.”

Casual watchers of snowboarding didn’t see the Gold comeback. She wasn’t invited to the pre-Olympic media summits that introduced contenders to reporters. NBC didn’t gather the drippy video it banks for potential medalists.

And Gold remains in the bronze shadow; a shade made even more obscure by the radiant glow of Kim. She didn’t get the call to visit talk shows. She wasn’t rushed back to the States for a media tour. When NBC made a fun video of her holding a handmade sign asking for pins in exchange for a photo with her and her medal, she said most of the passersby in the Olympic coastal village didn’t recognize her without her helmet, goggles and board.

Fine by her.

She’s spent the week after winning bronze visiting as many Olympic events as she can. The hard-core Broncos fan loves her sports.

“I’m here at the Olympics going to hockey and spending time with my friends and really experiencing what the Olympics are about, which I didn’t get to do in Sochi,” she said. “For me, the medal is more of a validation for myself than for anyone else. I didn’t do this for glory. Snowboarders do it for the love of the sport and the love of progression. More than anything, it just felt good. It����ap not so much about proving people wrong as much as it’s about proving to myself that I can do whatever I set my mind to.”

You get a crazy-bleeping-fun and irreverent Games that would make roll over in his grave. That����ap a good thing. It����ap about time to push this stuffy old winter sports carnival into the 21st century, don’t you think?

When adolescents rule the Olympics, F-bombs spontaneously erupt on national television. Authority, like gravity, is often ignored. Everything, from the fireworks at opening ceremonies to the freezing weather, is described as “insane.” During competition, athletes get hangry instead of nervous. And we’ll get on with the serious business of winning a gold medal, but not until after sending one last tweet on the cellphone.

On Tuesday, teen snowboarder Chloe Kim created the definitive Olympic meme of 2018. And it wasn’t her gold-medal performance, although her tricks in the halfpipe were beyond sick. They were insane, as all the cool kids like to say.

But know what was even better? It was the incredulous look Kim gave an adult that asked what the heck she was thinking on at the top of the halfpipe before her final run, when instead of concentrating on the biggest athletic moment of her young life, because she had neglected to finish her breakfast sandwich.

“Like, what else am I supposed to do?” asked Kim, regarding the journalist as if he had been transported to South Korea directly from the Dark Ages. “Watching the contest just makes me more nervous and anxious. It����ap like when you’re just waiting there, when you’re supposed to go to the theme park and your parents are taking forever.”

Kim is your typical 17-year-old girl in every way, except for the fact she pilots a snowboard the way Aladdin rode a magic carpet. She hates to roll out of bed at 6 a.m., even on the morning when going out to play at the the Olympics is on her schedule. Hanging with her roommate in the athletes village was cool, because fellow snowboarder Arielle Gold of Steamboat Springs was always “down” to order a pizza or shoot some pool, and “it����ap fun to have a buddy.”

The International Olympic Committee, like Apple and every other major corporation seeking to make big bucks in the 21st century, is seeking a younger demographic. The problem? Teenagers look at live sports on network television the same way they look at black-and-white comics printed in a newspaper. They don’t.

Red Gerard, a 17-year-old from Silverthorne, arrived in South Korea, claiming to have no clue what the Olympics were all about. His father told me that was the honest truth, because Gerard is a member of a generation that believes every important power in the universe can be found in the palm of an adolescent����ap hand, delivered via the smartphone.

On the night before he competed in slopestyle, Gerard passed out watching Netflix, overslept, misplaced his winter coat and watched videos of his buddies shot-gunning beers on the way to the hill for the competition. Then he won a gold medal for the USA, a feat he celebrated by grabbing a friend and exclaiming “Holy f—!” It caught the network censors, to say nothing of America, by surprise.

This is what happens when you put teenagers in charge of the Olympics.

NBC host Mike Tirico apologized to the TV audience for Gerard’s profanity.

Sorry? Sorry for what? The Olympics have been far too serious, far too corporate, far too pre-packaged and far from spontaneous for far too long.

Teenagers have made the Games more insane, more profane, more like real life and more outrageous fun.

Don’t know about you. But I’m hangry for more.

PyeongChang current time

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Chloe Kim’s coronation is complete. The 17-year-old from Torrance, California, dominated the Olympic women’s halfpipe snowboarding final on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018 soaring to a gold medal four years in the making. American Arielle Gold, who pondered retirement last summer, edged teammate and three-time Olympic medalist Kelly Clark for bronze. Jiayu Liu of China took silver.

PyeongChang current time

BONGPYEONG, South Korea — Shout it from the top of Mount Werner: Gold wins bronze!

Arielle Gold added another medal to the long, rich Olympic legacy of Steamboat Springs by finishing third Tuesday in the highest-flying, most gravity-defying halfpipe competition that women have ever waged on snowboards.

“I’m sure Steamboat is proud … To bring home a medal to a town that has given me so much is amazing,” said Gold, who’s 14-karat Colorado to the core.

Here’s all you need to know about her Rocky Mountain cred. When I walked up to Gold late last week to inquire about her Olympic dreams, she insisted on asking me a question before starting our conversation about snowboarding.

“So,” Gold said, her voice stern and direct, with a no-messing-around tone, “who’s going to be the next starting quarterback for my Broncos?”

She won Olympic bronze for ����apountry, which, as we all well know, hasn’t had a lot of bright, shiny moments to smile about of late.

In a situation where it would have been oh-so-easy for Gold to fold, she was a rock star. And maybe that����ap the real victory here.

While snowboarding is known for that easy what-up-bruh vibe, Gold is anything but a carefree kid at age 21. Truth be known, she’s a little hard on herself, with an inner voice that sometimes criticizes so pointedly that it drives out some of the joy in grabbing big air on a board.

“That’s just who I am,” Gold said. “I’ve always been hard on myself.”

The last place a competitor wants to be in a snowboard competition is first to drop in the pipe. Judges, being human, like to save their best scores for later. Gold batted lead-off among the 12 Olympic finalists. And the pressure showed on her first run, as Gold was unable to land the 1080, three-rotation trick essential to reaching the podium in a rapidly evolving sport.

Heading into her third and final shot at a medal, the scores posted on the board in front of Gold were daunting, with the best riders in the world, including Liu Jiayu of China, as well as U.S. teammates Chloe Kim and Kelly Clark with an iron grip on the top three spots in this competition.

Staring into the halfpipe, with all her Olympic dreams riding non a single run, Gold had a quiet, little talk with herself.

“Right before I was dropping in, things were pretty quiet up there,” she said. “But what I was trying to tell myself at the top were positive mantras: ‘Still got this … One more run … Leave it all out there … No holding back.'”

With the pressure on, however, Gold did not blink. Her 1080 was big and beautiful, almost as magnificent as the triumphant smile she flashed when her score of 85.75 lit up the scoreboard. Kim won gold. Liu took silver. Gold refused to beat herself.

Gold had to go. There was a bronze medal to collect. A story of beating whispers of doubt, fear and negativity to be told 1,000 more times in front of television cameras. Toasts to be raised with family and friends.

Before marching away from the halfpipe she conquered, I had one more important question for Gold.

Who should be the next starting quarterback of her beloved Denver Broncos?

“Kirk Cousins,” said Gold, smiling like a champion.

PyeongChang current time

BONGPYEONG, South Korea — It����ap Chloe Kim’s halfpipe. Everyone else is a visitor.

The 17-year-old boarding prodigy sailed to America’s third gold in three days on Tuesday in the Olympic halfpipe with flawless 1080s and unrivaled style.

The crowd at the sprawling venue roared its approval for the Korean American teenager from California as she danced down the pipe. The rest of the 12-athlete field fought to follow. In one of the most progressive halfpipe contests in history, more than a half dozen athletes spun 1080s, including Steamboat Springs’ Arielle Gold, who spent her Christmas break learning that demanding three-rotation trick. The 1080 was part of a larger overhaul by Gold, who reignited her passion for snowboarding this year with a mental and physical effort that culminated with the Olympic podium that eluded her in the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

“It����ap not even the results. It����ap just like the whole experience, the whole process has been so much more enjoyable for me,” she said, grasping the American flag around her shoulders. “I know people can see it in my riding and I can feel it every time I go up on the hill.”

While Steamboat fields a bounty of Olympians every cycle, including here in South Korea, the number who return with medals is much smaller.

“I think that Steamboat is proud to have so many Olympians here, but to be able to bring home a medal to the town that has given me so much is amazing,” Gold said.

A year ago, there were two women snowboarders in the world who spun 1080s in the halfpipe: Kim and five-time Olympian Kelly Clark. On Tuesday, five athletes landed the trick and those who did it best won medals. For her third and final run — a victory lap with her gold already locked down — Kim upped her first-run score with a pair of back-to-back 1080s, a combination only she has mastered. The crowd erupted as judges rewarded her efforts with a 98.25.

Kim said she wasn’t going to be satisfied going home with a gold medal knowing she could have thrown down a better run.

“I put on a really good first run but I was also like I can do better than that and I can one-up myself. That third run was just to prove to myself that I can do better,” she said, noting that she spent the time between her runs on social media, tweeting things like how she wished she’d finished her breakfast sandwich because she was “getting hungry.” “I was trying to distract myself and think of things in a positive way.”

China’s Jiayu Liu won silver with a solid 1080 and big switch airs. Veteran Clark finished just behind Gold in fourth, throwing the 1080 that she pioneered in the pipe and has since spread like wildfire among competitors half her age.

“I think so much of the time the Olympics can be something that you just survive and make it through and today I was calling all the shots,” Clark said. “I enjoyed myself and managed myself well and I rode well.”

Clark, 34, is nearing the end of a stellar career that has made her the most decorated snowboarder in the sport. No one has climbed more podiums. Few have had such a sweeping influence on the sport.

“I don’t think a lot of people get to stay around long enough to see what their legacies could be,” she said. “This U.S. team is an incredible group of talented young women and I’m so proud of them. I think my Olympic career could end today, but theirs is just getting started.”