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To an audience, a public collapse often appears in slow motion. This was no exception. Everyone present saw it happening. Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Kelly Clark was losing it. She started fine, but suddenly her rhythm broke. She hesitated, hesitated again, and then there was silence.

"I'm choking," she confessed to the standing-room-only crowd.

Who would believe it? Although she's only 18 (she turns 19 on July 26), Clark has been impeccable under pressure. She won the halfpipe at the Junior Worlds in 2000. She's won U.S. championships in both halfpipe and boardcross, and in February at the Salt Lake City Olympics, she blew out the world's best riders, virtually snatching the gold out of midair in front of a raucous crowd of 16,500 and a TV audience of a cool 64 million.

Maybe if she had been strapped to a five-foot piece of wood and P-tex, Oakley goggles shielding the glare, blink-182 blasting through headphones, twirling, twisting, 17 feet above a hard-packed wall of snow -- money, ranking and respect on the line -- she would have pulled it off.

But here she was on June 12, chestnut hair brushed straight, gray shirt, black slacks and shoes, delivering a graduation speech to 15 sixth-graders from Dover (Vt.) Elementary. There was 60-pound Ronald in his ill-fitting navy sports jacket, and Margaret, proudly wearing her favorite flowered dress, a smile full of braces. Friends and neighbors, even Clark's former sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Neuman, all filling the Dover Town Hall, a pristine white building straight out of a Willa Cather novel. It was an audience of 200, maybe.

It couldn't have been a nicer group of Vermonters -- simple folk, familiar. Yet Clark, the champion, the go-to girl, stammered, stuttered and, as she put it, "dropped the ball." A last-minute recovery was too late. She smiled, wished them her best and left, befuddled by her performance.

Such is the dichotomy for the world's best female snowboarder. The sport finally lands the gap-jump from fringe to mainstream -- a move Clark helped direct with her win in Salt Lake -- and the small-town girl shines on the world stage. Yet back at home, amid the familiar, she stumbles.

***

"I come to hide out in Vermont," Clark says after her speech. She's home for the summer, recuperating from a nonstop post-Olympic whirlwind that took her from the White House to Europe to Asia and back. The town of Dover, where Clark moved from Rhode Island as an infant with her parents and older brother Tim, is a bucolic hamlet at the base of the Mt. Snow ski resort. Local legend has it that Dover was named for resident Amos Hayward's dog at a town meeting in 1810, and the neighborly feel has not abated. People wave. They sit and chat. They leave doors unlocked. The summer months are especially slow, and Clark, a typical Vermont outdoorswoman, keeps busy camping, biking and playing with the family golden retrievers, Peanut and Sam.

Yet with a population of just 1,410, Dover is not a place where a person can disappear, especially someone of relative fame. Not 45 minutes after her speech, Clark and best friend Damon Redd stroll into Fennessey's, a steak and chops restaurant, for an early dinner. The place is empty, and bartender Carl smiles when he sees Clark. "Heard you did a great job today," he says, half-joking.

Although Clark grew up in Dover, where for 23 years her parents have owned TC's, the town's popular family restaurant, she has always identified much more with the town's terrain than with its folk. Already skiing at 2, the downhill-bound grommet joined the Mt. Snow Ski Team for tykes. She climbed aboard a Mogul Monster snowboard from Kmart at 8 and permanently set aside her skis.


	It's been quite a year for Kelly Clark.

Clark immersed herself in riding because she was not comfortable with the social side of school. Tomboyish and reserved, she admittedly didn't fit in. As a 14-year-old freshman, she enrolled at Dover's Mt. Snow Academy, where athletes split time between training and classes. The school is open only for the winter term, so students sandwich the Academy between fall and spring semesters at a local high school. Clark's riding flourished, but her assimilation each spring at nearby Brattleboro Union High was awkward. "I couldn't even get someone to go to the prom with me," she says, her voice tinged with regret.

Today it's a starkly different tale. Clark has hung out with the president, been on Letterman, even met Britney Spears. Her victory parade down Route 100 in Dover on March 17 drew 10,000 fans, and folks still drop by TC's to see if the town's most famous resident is working in the garden or flipping burgers in the kitchen. Clark, both honest and self-assured, and, says Redd, "still the most humble girl," is tickled by the adulation. Yet the familiar soil of home has felt foreign lately. "Now, they're all like, 'You're so cool,' " says Clark, clearly suspect of her sudden popularity.

When it comes to riding, however, hot is a more accurate description, and she was scorching at Salt Lake City in February. A video of the Olympic TV broadcast shows Clark meditating, mugging for the camera, then firing the baddest run of her life, a combination of unabashed, inimitable air and technical McTwist and 720 spin treats. It perfectly showcases her aggressive, energetic riding style, and clearly puts her in a different league than the rest of the Olympic snowboarders.

"Kelly's riding as well as the men were at Nagano," said Jake Burton, live on tape from Salt Lake. He is the founder of Burton Snowboards, one of Clark's sponsors, and his comment was more prophetic than he realized. Clark's run and her alpha-male style have revolutionized the sport -- tricks must now be higher, harder and more harrowing -- which raises a crucial question: Are the rest of the women prepared to ride, or even capable of riding, at the level of, well, men? Well, maybe.

"We can all put down what Kelly put down," says Tricia Byrnes, a U.S. team rider in Salt Lake. Sure, it may be an overstatement to say Clark has ruined the sport, that she rocks the pipe so hard that her competitors should give up, switch sports or be content to ride for silver. But it is not an overstatement to say that Clark has moved the standard for women's riding way up the mountain.

So, what is her secret? She doesn't reveal much. "I see people doing tricks and I want to learn them," she says. "The frontside nine. That's next." This is not an intimation that she would like to try a frontside nine (900° -- 2 1/2 twists -- of revolution). This is a declaration: She will become the first woman to land the trick in competition. And herein lies the key to her success. Still a teenager, with an open spirit of a true Vermonter, Clark has not yet learned about limits. Injury has not slowed her. Fear is not a factor. And just like those endless green vistas in southern Vermont, everything appears boundless to her. "You can always go bigger," she says.


	Everyone is fighting for second when Kelly hits the halfpipe.

Clark shares a winter apartment in the snowboarding hub of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., with friend and snowboarder Jana Manfredi. But it is no surprise that she adores the three-story house that contains TC's, which she's called home all of her life. The top floor, complete with three bedrooms, country-style kitchen and living room, has an inviting, lived-in feel. Dozens of spider plants and cacti bask in the light provided by large windows and a vaulted ceiling. Snapshots of the entire family adorn all bare space. While a photographer sets up lights, Redd and another high school pal, Dylan Griffin, drop by. They find Clark atop the TV set in full Burton regalia, surrounded by medals, trophies and plaques. The photographer urges a variety of "fun" poses, and the three teens goof and giggle. The Clark home is never empty: Family, friends and visitors are always welcome in a place where anyone would be comfortable -- even in Clark's sty of a bedroom.

"I tried to clean up," says Clark, renowned on the tour for her slovenly habits. "I just wish I had clean clothes sometimes."

Where she chooses to create her next mess is uncertain. Riding is a priority, but after the intensity of the past six months, she's thrilled to have time to slide before it's time to ride: "I've nailed most of my goals. I'm looking forward to more park and freestyle riding, and not competing so much."

There are other outlets as well. Following her high school graduation in the spring of 2001, she was accepted by the U. of Rhode Island, though she's deferred admission. Clark shows off charcoal drawings and several sculptures she's created, perhaps suggesting a future with more sedate activities.

But for the time being, for the next week or the next month or until the snow flies, she will plant begonias in the garden, paint the side of the house and help Tim when the restaurant gets swamped. She'll cruise around town listening to Springsteen or the Strokes, catch a movie with Damon and Dylan, then head to TC's for a dish of her favorite, spaghetti in butter sauce. She'll keep moving, keep doing. Confinement doesn't suit Kelly Clark, the regular girl who has traveled the world, won gold -- "the coolest thing I've ever done" -- met Britney, changed a sport.

The regular girl who is never far from home.

This article appears in the August 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine.