On Feb. 19, 1968, a 19-year-old American sylph in a blue dress sewn by her mother won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France. It was the first Olympics broadcast in color, and the performance was televised live. America fell in love. Given that only seven years had passed since the entire U.S. figure skating team had been wiped out in a plane crash en route to the Prague World Figure Skating Championships, and that Peggy Fleming was the only American gold-medal winner at Grenoble, the excitement was justified. Figure skating had its biggest star since Sonja Henie. Fleming became a genuine celebrity, with five primetime specials.

But her triumph wasn’t the main event at Grenoble. The bona fide star was France’s Jean-Claude Killy, who performed the spectacular feat of winning alpine skiing’s triple crown, taking golds in downhill, slalom, and giant slalom. In 1968, gracious acknowledgement of the “wide world of sports” didn’t preclude Americans from appreciating greatness in competitions that, for the most part, were foreign to them. Killy dazzled Americans as much as he did the rest of the world and became a household name for a while. The king and queen of Grenoble graced covers of Life magazine, when making the cover of Life meant you were truly famous.

Gone with the wind. The aura from the 2006 Winter Olympics is not the ecumenism and glamour of Grenoble, but crudeness, vulgar nativism, and callowness. This was most apparent in the focus on snowboarding, a group of tricks invented by American teenagers in the 1960s and popularized by ESPN’s X Games. As “snowboard cross” champion Seth Westcott gloated, “I’m only seeing it from the U.S. side but seeing the amount of marketing that went into this Olympics based around snowboarding, I think snowboarding is really becoming the heart and soul of the Olympic Games.”

Who can disagree? Four out of six snowboarding events were held the first week, dominating a huge chunk of coverage. Americans cleaned up, winning gold and silver in the men’s halfpipe, gold and silver in women’s halfpipe, gold in the men’s snowboard cross, and silver in the women’s snowboard cross, where American Lindsey Jacobellis screwed up a sure shot at gold with a dumb stunt at the last minute. Whatever. It was kewl.

The Stoner Olympics have arrived. The games’ most identifiable personality has been “the flying tomato” Shaun White, the amiable skateboard phenom turned snowboarder, who took the gold in the iPod half-pipe. (The snowboarders’ uniforms were actually outfitted with speakers built into the hoods and a control panel on the sleeve.) When dudette Hannah Teter, gold medalist in the women’s halfpipe, appeared on David Letterman’s show, hair poking out from under a grungy knit cap, leg flung over the arm of the chair, all Letterman could say was, “I’m getting older by the minute.”

At some point, the zeitgeist decreed that skiing, a sport in which athletes attain speeds up to 85 mph and expert practitioners have died, is dull and stodgy, and snowboarding, a sport of judged tricks, is not. Killy is about as with-it as go-go boots—as with-it as the phrase with-it.

That said, one sport eclipsing another didn’t have to bring on the collapse of will I saw on NBC’s coverage. What happened? As with a heart attack, the reasons are multifactorial, but I would pick three: anti-elitisim, jingoism, and commercialism.

The Winter Olympics were always second banana to the summer games, but they once meant something. They were exotic and consisted of sports with which most Americans had no everyday experience. These were the fantasy Olympics, and that was nowhere more apparent than in the two marquee events, alpine skiing and figure skating. The appeal of alpine skiing was based on French glamour and elegance (Jean-Claude Killy), sexy Italian sizzle (Alberto Tomba), and dazzling Nordic competence (Ingemar Stenmark, Toni Sailer). These European sportsmen came from the same cultural DNA as Jean-Paul Belmondo, James Bond, and Ingmar Bergman. Watching them combined the excitement of watching a great sporting event with going to an art-house cinema. And they won.

Displays of nationalism began innocently enough with the rapturous win of the U.S. hockey team in 1980 and metastasized into ugly soccer-style hooliganism in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The USA! USA! fist-pumping jingoism of the 1984 Olympics was so extreme it bothered even the conservative columnist Dick Young, who bemoaned the obsession with anything American, including “small-bores rifle competition,” to the exclusion of anything non-American. Only American champions had names, the rest were relegated to Palookaville. The only exception was Katarina Witt, a gorgeous figure skater who dueled an American for the championship and posed for Playboy.

On NBC’s “Olympic Zone,” Jane Hansen told us that speedskating Yanks Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick were upstaged by an Italian “national hero” but didn’t bother to tell us his name (Enrico Fabris). Jim Lehrer announced that Americans Belbin and Agosto had won the silver medal for ice-dancing, while “a Russian couple” had won the gold. And men’s alpine skiing was billed as Bode Miller vs. A Bunch of Faceless Europeans. When Miller bungled to a series of hapless losses, coverage of alpine skiing went down the tubes. Miller’s entire persona represented the triumph of snowboarding values in the world of alpine skiing.

Finally, the networks are run by people who have a dollar sign where the Y chromosome normally is. Ladies’ figure skating is always a winner. The 1994 final was the second-highest-rated sporting event ever, but the 1998 Nagano Olympics drew the lowest ratings in 30 years. Ratings rebounded with the Salt Lake City games, a domestic Olympics that benefited from post-9/11 patriotism. After paying $613 million for television rights, executives were taking no chances, deciding to perform a gene transplant from the wildly popular ESPN Winter X Games and focus on a surging sport dominated by Americans. When snowboarding first crashed onto the scene in the 1960s, the culture clash between the new sport and skiing was raw. Over the years, as snowboarding underwent a natural process of commercialization and co-optation, it appeared that the culture war was over. Now it seems that there was no truce but annihilation.

As a two cheers for capitalism type, I wouldn’t argue with this decision, except for one problem: it hasn’t worked. Although Dick Ebersol claims that NBC will make a profit on the Olympics, ratings were poor, and critics were scathing in their denunciation of the coverage. NBC tried one gimmick after another to fill the vacuum, even having Bob Costas interview Jerome Bettis on Saturday night. (He looked relieved to be speaking to an athlete he could recognize.) A schoolboy spat between Shani Davis—the first African-American athlete to win an individual Winter Games gold medal, as we were dutifully and tiresomely lectured—and Chad Hedrick was inflated into a national event. Strange-boy skater Apolo Anton Ohno was on, it seemed, every night, perhaps because some executive thought his Maynard G. Krebs facial hair would appeal to youth. None of it worked until the women figure skaters took to the ice, and NBC finally beat the competition—after “American Idol” was over.

Does the vulgarity of the television coverage matter? After all, depending on TV for live sporting events in the internet age is ludicrous. By the time Americans see the results, the competition is over and what they are watching is a tape-delayed sham with reporters pretending to break news that they know has already been broken. True, Fleming’s live performance wasn’t much of a surprise. She had racked up so many points that only a bad spill would have taken the gold away. But the performance was live. The effect was so exhilarating that people remember it as being a flawless performance even though it wasn’t. What’s left for primetime coverage is trumped-up soap opera.

Times change, youth must be served, and snowboarding doesn’t herald the end of Western civilization. I confess that I admire the pizzazz, and bodacious fearlessness of those little snowboarding devils and she-devils. Try doing a 50/50 grind in a burqa. Having to wear a burqa would be so whack.

The Winter Olympics used to be a once-in-four-years fantasy trip to a better place, a chance to think of yourself as something out of your reality: a daredevil downhill racer, an ice princess, or Jean-Claude Killy’s girlfriend. If this Olympics is any indication, total gnarliosity has insinuated itself like kudzu and killed all native life forms. The glamour is gone.

Can we all get along? My heart says yes, my head says no. You can’t have it all, pop culturally speaking. You can have an Olympics based on sophistication, grit, and beauty, or you can have one based on childish pranks and petulance. NBC could have ignored the nonsense and focused on real sports and real personalities, but they chose to focus on kid stuff. Next time, I think I’ll pass.

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Diana Moon writes from New York.