The teen titans: here are three rising stars to watch in the more extreme Olympic events.

Age: 18

Sport: snowboarding, halfpipe

Snowboarding went mainstream with its 1998 Olympic debut, but Clark has kept her edge. She can explode out of the halfpipe, a half-cylinder tube dug into a ski slope, with difficult upside-down aerial twists and turns. Judges score the event based on the tricks, the height achieved above the halfpipe lip, and the overall appearance. The key: "Training hard and staying focused," Clark says. "It takes a lot of practice to keep doing well."

Age: 19

Sport: short-track speedskating

Think NASCAR on skates. Four to six skaters zip around a track on a hockey rink for 4 1/2 to 13 1/2 laps. Short-track isn't about time, it's about who emerges from the pack to finish first. That's usually Ohno, who dominated the U.S. Olympic trials and could do the same against the world. Why does he love short-track, an Olympic event since 1992? "For me, it's the speed, the fact that I can go up to 35 mph on a 1-millimeter-thick piece of metal under my feet," Ohno says, "then doing a complete U-turn on a dime."

Age: 19

Sport: freestyle skiing, moguls

Mayer's sport, added to the Olympics in 1992, is all about bumps and jumps. Half the score is on technique navigating a hill littered with moguls. A quarter is on two trick-laden aerial displays. The last quarter is on pure speed. His tricks include the 360 iron cross and quad twister (they look like they sound). but his secret weapon is physics. He uses formulas to calculate the best route, and even wrote a paper on it for a group of engineers. The mind game is key. "Mogul skiing is intense," Mayer says. "People ski on the edge, and sometimes they blow up." That's in a good way.