Hop on board for the Winter Olympics

It is the cold of the New Jersey winter morning, perhaps, that keeps him from combusting on the spot. Though he doesn't know it yet, Finch has just won a spot on the United States Olympic snowboarding halfpipe team - perhaps the hippest mop-haired foursome since the Beatles - and the hill seems to be trembling, still, from the kinetic force of his performance.

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SNOWY SUPERSTARS: Shaun White (right) is surrounded by media after winning a record fifth straight title at the Chevrolet US Snowboard Grand Prix in Vernon, N.J., Jan. 22. ANDY NELSON

The run is a statement carved in the hillside itself - and visible from as far away as Turin, Italy: Four years after US riders swept the men's halfpipe medals in Salt Lake City, they are poised to do it again.

This weekend's event was the last US qualifier for the Turin Games next month, and the four men and four women of the team stepped into the press tent afterward to proclaim to the country that they were, in fact, both "stoked" and "pumped."

After two Winter Olympiads, the ladies and gentlemen of the snowboarding team are still ill- fitted for the classical image of the Olympian. Somewhere, skulking in the back of a high school math class, there is surely someone who looks like Shaun White - a gangly teenager with a toothy grin and thatch of untidy hair that could scare the teeth off a comb.

But put him in a trough of hardpacked snow, and he becomes Pythagoras in baggy pants, twisting his wire-thin body in an incomprehensible proof of aerial geometry.

In 2002, the event was must-see stuff. In 2006, it could be an entertaining rerun.

		THE CROWD GOES WILD: Fans roar with approval as Shaun White finishes his run. This was the last in a five-week series to select the US halfpipe team. ANDY NELSON