While Sage’s potential was undeniable, much of the podium talk around the Games turned toward Mark McMorris or Ståle Sandbech. Sage was part of the conversation, but due to his lack of dominant performances in slopestyle his name was often mentioned in passing. Many saw him with a bronze or silver medal around his collar, though not a gold. Hell, had he not qualified in the 11th hour his Olympic ambitions would have never been realized.

But for Sage, none of that mattered. It was the opportunity to be part of something larger than himself, to show people on a world stage how snowboarding should be portrayed. “I’m not hating on anyone in halfpipe or anything, but I wanted to show a sick side of snowboarding that’s fun. We are super competitive but we have a good time. We’re not a bunch of robots.”

At qualifiers the judges placed him in 18th and he, along with his fellow Olympians, was puzzled. The now-standard triple cork was not scoring high and going big was not consistently rewarded. “I didn’t even think about it, just crossed it out of my mind. It was like the same thing as Mammoth again. You can’t always be having a great time thinking of the best situations. Sometimes there are some really stressful situations and it’s not that fun. But you have to remember that this is just snowboarding. But it is really hard to think about that when you’re at the Olympics because I was just being like, ‘Ok, it’s just another comp.’ But there was just an aura around it, because it’s not. I was at the Olympics. So it was hard to cross that out of my mind.”

Sage then qualified for finals as the sole American, center digits in mind and focused simply on snowboarding. What happened after he dropped in marked a monumental change in the way our lifestyle is represented to the masses. He won. Sage Kotsenburg won an Olympic Gold Medal.

The world scrambled to find out what this guy from Park City was all about, and he showed them. There was no charade. Whether it was explaining what the knuckle of a jump was to a clueless David Letterman, receiving a bacon medal from Conan O’Brien, a trip to the Oval Office, or the countless media interviews he did, each sentence and bit of snowboarding vernacular that came out of Sage’s mouth was real. “Everything changed but everything’s also totally the same. I see everyone on the mountain and I’m just Sage. It’s cool.”

In many ways, Sage embodies the soul of what makes snowboarding revered by so many — the ability to choose your own line and say fuck it, let’s do it this way because it looks fun. It is not what the judges think, or the coaches, or the media. It is about what the rider thinks is right — the power of self-expression. At this moment, snowboarding could not ask to have a better ambassador.

And it all started with Middle Fingers Up.

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