IT'S, LIKE, YOU KNOW, A REAL TRIP.

Byline: PAUL OBERJUERGE

PARK CITY, Utah - Well, stick that in your hash pipe and smoke it, old dudes. Oh, yeah, we don't do drugs anymore. We're athletes now.

Welcome to snowboarding in the land of the free and home of the baked. Just now, a nation has its snowboarders to thank for its only gold medal in the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games, and maybe that will endear those crazy kids to the oldsters - and those crabby skiers. For a day, anyway.

Kelly Clark, a deceptively normal 18-year-old from Vermont, won the women's halfpipe (hey, you said ``pipe'') snowboard event Sunday while her fellow Yanks were getting thrashed by Austrians in the men's downhill, the biggest event on the Alpine ski schedule.

In Winter Olympics terms, the downhill is the Kentucky Derby, and snowboarding is quarterhorses at the county fair. Seriously de classe. Down-market. Gauche.

But it is snowboarding that is the booming sport, skiing that seems hopelessly retro, and rest assured Yanks under the age of 30 are much more likely to know today about Kelly Clark than Fritz Schwarzenegger, or whichever Austrian it was who bagged the downhill. Harrumph.

The perception is that snowboarders are viewed by the International Olympic Committee much as they are by stodgy, middle-aged skiers - as brain-dead cretins, reckless fools, the cockroaches of the mountain, loathsome but inescapable.

Snowboarders haven't done much to change that image. The first man to win an Olympic snowboard slalom gold, Ross Rebagliati of Canada, failed his drug test at Nagano for, you guessed it, marijuana. He blamed it on second-hand smoke, which seemed plausible enough given snowboarders' cliche fondness for the weed.

In the halfpipe, competitors are allowed to compete to music of their choosing (Clark won to Guns n' Roses' ``Welcome to the Jungle''), which gives the event the ear-assaulting noise kids seem to prefer with their sports. And lends it the decorum of, oh, pro wrestling.

Halfpipe also calls for hyperkinetic announcers shouting out analysis in jargon-thick teen-speak nearly impenetrable to anyone old enough to drink legally. Imagine Michelle Kwan's routine recapitulated by a guy who didn't take his Ritalin and dropped out of 11th grade, and you get the idea.

The unspoken fear in the land of the five rings is that snowboarding someday might, gasp, usurp skiing's status atop the heap of mountain sports. ``Alpine is getting smaller all around the world,'' said Doriane Vidal of France, the silver-medalist.

Who knows? Maybe by the Winter Games of the XXIXth Olympiad (40 years from now), the establishment will all be over at the snowboard downhill, and skiing will be as funky and quaint as ``modern'' pentathlon. What many traditionalists don't realize is that a debate continues to rage among snowboarders whether their sport should be in the Olympics at all. That it represents a sort of sellout of a pure sport that should be about art and self-fulfillment rather than rules and regulations and trying to impress some IOC-approved judge.

Clark, the gold-medalist, suggested Sunday that her victory might help bridge the gap between snowboarders and ski traditionalists - showing that a hard-core American snowboarder can win Olympic gold, and demonstrating to Baby Boomer America that snowboarding is a worthwhile, perhaps even respectable pursuit.

Well, maybe. For now, snowboarding seems to remain the winter sport of preference for the ``Dude, Where's My Car?'' set. A sort of Cheech-and-Chong-Hit-the-Slopes experience. Random tricks and jumps, followed by recreational drugs. When they talk about taking medalists to ``doping control'' in this sport, you can't help but laugh.

Snowboarders may have the last laugh, though, come the Winter Games of 2042, when snowboarders have 16 events and get all the TV time, and skiing is sent to the little mountain and roundly ignored by NBC, ESPN, MTV and The New York Times.