SNOWY SURF IS HER TURF; BURNSIDE MASTER AT SKATEBOARDING SLOPES.

Byline: Damian Dottore Orange County Register

Mary-Love Burnside nearly pushed over the barricade lining Mammoth Mountain's halfpipe, balancing on her toes, trying to get the best vantage point to see her daughter, Cara-Beth, at the top.

The biggest run of her eight-year snowboarding career was ready to begin, and Mary-Love didn't want to miss a thing as Cara-Beth zigged and zagged down the 110-meter halfpipe Saturday at the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix, the final qualifier for the inaugural Olympic snowboard team.

At times, the 29-year-old rider from Orange hid from her mother, disappearing behind her bright orange signature snowboard, as she defied gravity with her twists and turns high above the mountain.

But right on cue, Cara-Beth rocketed out of the halfpipe, executing the most difficult trick of her routine directly in front of her mother.

How's that, mom?

Mary-Love could no longer contain the excitement she had bottled up inside as she threw up her arms and flashed a quick thumbs up to Cara-Beth. She knew the next time her daughter would land it would be at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

``Did I make it that obvious how nervous I was,'' Mary-Love said. ``I just get so excited when I see her do well. I am very proud of her, but it wouldn't have been the end of the world if she didn't make the Olympics.''

Ever since Jake Burton, the man many snowboarders regard as the founder and patron saint of their sport, sat in his living room in Londonderry, Vt., in the late 1970s, shaping his first primitive snowboard designs to surf the snow, snowboarders have been trying to shed their outlaw image among skiing's purists.

But Cara-Beth has mixed feelings now that it looks as if skiing has accepted its renegade brethren, making halfpipe and giant slalom snowboarding - the sport which Time magazine once labeled the Worst New Sport - an official Olympic event for the first time.

Don't take her sentiments wrong. Burnside is overwhelmed by the opportunity to represent the United States. But she is afraid that all the freedom and creativity which has become snowboarding's trademark will be swallowed by the scientific approach many athletes bring to other Olympic sports.

Now, she fears, snowboarding will turn into sports such as figure skating and gymnastics, sports in which parents start their children off at early ages preaching an Olympics-or-else agenda at every practice. That's the opposite approach Burnside used in her own Olympic run.

``I just kind of fell into the Olympics. I never intended to go to the Olympics in any sport. But that is just the way things happened this year,'' Burnside said while she defrosted in front of the fireplace in the lobby of her hotel. ``This might legitimize the sport. But, if that were my intention, I would be in a different sport.''

Although snowboarding has been part of ESPN's Winter X Games, an Olympic-style extreme sports festival drawing athletes from as far away as France, Burnside believes the sport has kept its free-spirited edge because ESPN has presented a larger picture of the sport than what will be on display at the Winter Olympics.

``There is so much more to snowboarding than halfpipe and giant slalom,'' said Burnside, who won a halfpipe gold at the X Games in Crested Butte, Colo.

``At the X Games, they have other events as well, like boarder cross, big air and slope style. I mean there are guys that will go up to the top of a huge cliff and ride their boards off. One small mistake and it's death. I just don't think the Olympics are showcasing snowboarding to its fullest right now.''

Burnside might make a comfortable living carving up the powder at every major ski resort around the world, but she is a skateboarder at heart.

Every fakie and McTwist - highly technical acrobatic snowboarding moves - that she performs while schussing down the slopes she can trace back to the drained swimming pools and crowded skate parks in Southern California where her balancing act began at age 11.

Thanks to her sidewalk surfing, Burnside, barely a teen-ager at the time, landed a starring role in ``A Different Kind of Winning,'' in which she played an unknown skate rat trying to knock off the local champion.

Burnside quickly found out that skateboarding was not a sport geared for girls. There weren't any girls only events at the time. If she wanted to compete, she would have to share the halfpipe with all the guys, even if it meant skating against the legendary Tony Hawk.

``I don't know why that was the case then. There were and are a lot of girls who love skateboarding as much as me,'' Burnside said. ``But I think it's great that things are changing now. We had 50 girls show up for the girls only Skate Jam in San Diego.''

It was some 600 miles to the north in Lake Tahoe where Burnside discovered snowboarding. And from the moment the UC Davis human development student first wobbled onto the slopes of the Sierra it was a match destined for Nagano.

Every chance she could get during her college days in the early '90s, she would head to the mountains and use the money she had saved by sleeping on her friends' apartment floors instead of in a motel and recycling aluminum cans to splurge and buy a lift ticket which was going for about $30 at the time.

``She probably knows every apartment floor in Tahoe. But she was very focused and she kept getting better,'' her mother said. ``She would get all kinds of odd jobs around Tahoe and do whatever she could to go snowboarding.''

Her snowboard might not have the four wheels on which she grew up. But Michelle Taggart - the rider who Burnside said is like art in motion when she rides the halfpipe - thinks a lot of Burnside's street smarts show through the snow.

``She has developed some trademark moves in snowboarding, and I think that is all a result of her skateboarding,'' said Taggart, who won the U.S. Halfpipe Grand Prix at Mammoth. ``She is just a fantastic competitor that I love to watch.''

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PHOTO (Color) no caption (Cara-Beth Burnside)

Orange County Register