WINTER OLYMPICS: SNOWBOARDER SEES HOPES GO UP IN SMOKE

GOLD MEDALS affect people in different ways. For Ross Rebagliati, a
snowboard medallist in Nagano, Japan, four years ago, the gold medal caused
him to split from his fiancee, gave him international fame as one of the
Olympics' most celebrated drugs cases and now finds it has barred him from
entry into the United States.

Rebagliati was the most entertaining and controversial of winners four
years ago. He and his fellow snowboarders had been welcomed into the
Olympics for the first time and they cut a new image, baggier of clothes
and cooler of attitude than the Games had been accustomed to. There was
thus general amusement and very little collective surprise when Rebagliati
tested positive for marijuana and was stripped of his gold.

His story then got better. His fellow riders started wearing 'Free Ross'
slogans on their T-shirts and Rebagliati had the gall to suggest he was an
unlucky victim of "passive smoking", that he had obviously taken in too
much of the evil fumes in a bar back home in Whistler weeks earlier.

Then came his moment of glory. His Canadian delegation checked the rules
and discovered that marijuana was not on the International Olympic
Committee's list of banned drugs. Rebagliati was reinstated, he was
rewarded with international renown far beyond that of almost every other of
his fellow champions and the snowboarding posse was able to stick up two
fingers to the IOC.

This is all rather amusing until he takes over the story. Despite being a
snowboarder, he says, he had never actually seen himself as the sort of
rebel to take on the most powerful sports body in the world, just being a
gold medallist would have been enough. New-found fame was hard to handle.

"I got engaged shortly after the Olympics," he says. "It was a spur of the
moment thing and kind of a product of feeling a little isolated from my
comfort zone. Of course, you can't do things like that." Thus the
engagement failed. "I broke it off. That was a six-month ordeal which was
enough to break your back on its own."

He also bought a house he couldn't afford. "I was being told by the
corporate community in Canada that I was going to be able to take advantage
of all these new endorsement deals and I would have to think about how to
handle the money. I bought the property thinking it would be true." It wasn't.

The endorsement deals that did come his way, however, conflicted with those
of the Canadian national team and so the year after the Games, he found
himself cast out of the team and training on his own. This was not much fun
and so he took the following year off, he made a comeback last year but
then found himself in a no-win situation: because he was not in the
Canadian team, he could not accrue enough points to qualify for the big
events, and because he didn't have enough points, he was unable to get back
into the Canadian team.

Could he win the gold again in Salt Lake City? "Absolutely!" he insists.
But because of all this he will not be in town as a competitor - that is if
he is allowed there at all.

Last weekend, the Olympic hangover was still lingering when he was turned
away from a flight from Vancouver to Las Vegas because a drugs incident
showed up on a computer. "Now I have an immigration lawyer!" he says. "It
seems I need a waiver to get into the US, it's a big problem for me; my
mother lives in California. This is a major hit to my lifestyle."

Yet despite all this, the Whistler One relates his problems with all the
laid-back equanimity of a true snowboarder. He has, after all, got to play
golf with Freddie Couples and John Daly and his initial ill-advised sortie
into property-buying has opened a career in the real estate market.

Is he not selling out snowboarding ideals by moving into an area as
commercial as real estate? "I'm not going to be concerned with the image of
snowboarding or what the norm would be, I'm just taking opportunities," he
replies. "Anyway, it fits my lifestyle great because I can talk to people
on the chairlifts during the day and make contacts that way."

And finally, what of the great passive smoking story? "It's true," he insists.

Does he smoke marijuana now? "With the US being so close and having a
zero-tolerance policy, it's not a question I can even begin to answer, as
much as I'd love to say openly what I'd like to do in my personal life,
I'll leave that up to people's imagination."