Edition: U.S. / Global

THE SKI REPORT; Flatlands Developing New-Age Competitors

Published: March 7, 2002

Travis Mayer, the 2002 Olympic silver medalist in freestyle moguls, was raised in Orchard Park, N.Y., a place more famous for its football stadium, home to the N.F.L.'s Buffalo Bills. There was plenty of snow in Mayer's neighborhood, but no mountains. He learned to ski on a hill with just 750 feet of vertical drop.

''If I didn't start doing tricks with my friends, we would have gone crazy,'' Mayer said.

The United States Olympic aerialist Brian Currutt grew up skiing outside Cleveland.

''I used to call myself the king of five turns,'' Currutt said. ''It was five turns from the top of my home mountain to the bottom. So we built jumps. What else could we do?''

Ross Powers, the snowboarding Olympic gold medalist in the half-pipe last month, learned his moves at Bromley Mountain in Vermont, a folksy layout hours south of that state's famed, sprawling ski areas.

The home mountain for Danny Kass, the silver medalist last month, was New Jersey's Mountain Creek, 47 miles from Manhattan. One of his former coaches, was Jimmy Weinbrecht, whose sister, Donna, the 1992 Olympic moguls gold medalist, learned to ski at another nearby New Jersey ski area, Hidden Valley.

What in the name of Jean-Claude Killy and decades of entrenched, Alp-shushing breeding is going on here?

The Salt Lake City Games were marked by the emergence of new-age sports -- and Americans' dominance in them -- but just as striking was how many of the new stars of the new snow sports came from new places. The demography of a Winter Olympics headliner is changing. They're not just daredevils, dare we say it. They're flatlanders.

There were always Winter Olympic medalists coming from smaller or medium-sized mountains -- Diann Roffe comes to mind -- but whoever visualized that the United States Ski Team would beat the bushes of New Jersey's rural Sussex County for the next medal hopeful?

People like Kass or Currutt may represent only a portion of the American Olympic team, but there is a trend. Currutt's best friend from his home mountain, Mariano Ferrario, was also a United States Olympic aerialist in 1998. Jillian Vogtli, who grew up near Mayer, was on the American women's Olympic freestyle team.

The landscape is being altered, literally, because the newer sports are great equalizers when it comes to terrain. Everyone may want 3,500 feet of vertical drop and acres of choices, but for the vertically challenged area -- which can often have limited snowfalls, too -- much can be done for the freestyle or snowboarding set in a confined space.

A steep pitch is not necessary for a decent, 400-foot half-pipe. An entire freestyle aerial complex, like the one that was host to the Olympics at Park City, would have fit inside an amateur baseball field. Few moguls runs are longer than 250 yards. Man-made snow can adequately cover these areas.

Now, to be fair, it's a bit deceiving to depict Mayer or Currutt as toiling away at their craft for 15 years on the hometown mountain, then waving goodbye to the locals on their way to the Olympics. Most world-class athletes find their way to elite, national coaches by their teenage years -- and those coaches are generally at the big resorts. Mayer eventually went to Steamboat Springs in Colorado and Currutt to Park City, just as Donna Weinbrecht went to Killington in Vermont years before.

But there are always exceptions. Some would say freestyle skiing and snowboarding is all about exceptions. When Powers was 9 years old, his fourth-grade classmates got off from school so they could go watch Powers compete in snowboarding's U.S. Open championship, an event he won by the time he was a freshman in high school.

Kass, meanwhile, was in Vernon (N.J.) High School a little more than a year ago. In 2001, he coached himself, with help from his older brother Matt, to win prestigious titles at the X Games, the U.S. Open and the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix.

Like Mayer, Kass is 19 years old. One of the best things, however, about these latest winter sports stars is that they bring diversity to the Winter Olympics and yet are anything but alike. They have come from different places in more than one way.

Mayer, who credited the hard-work ethic exhibited by his father and his Buffalo-area neighbors as a driving force in his Olympic success, is soon heading back to Cornell University.

Danny Kass, who, his brother Matt said, ''has never been in a gym in his life,'' is working on revising his role in a popular winter sports video game that exhibits his signature trick, the Kasserole.

Last month, Danny Kass was asked if he could ever see himself on a Wheaties box. ''Not Wheaties, man,'' he answered. ''I wouldn't eat Wheaties. Count Chocula maybe.''

They came from all sorts of new places. They are taking us to all sorts of new places.

Photo: Danny Kass, flying to Olympic silver in the men's halfpipe, learned his sport on Mountain Creek in New Jersey, 47 miles from Manhattan. (Barton Silverman/The New York Times)