Snowboarding’s inclusion in the Olympics has always had it’s advantages and disadvantages, but one love/hate consequence of the international coverage is huge mainstream exposure for the athletes involved.

Just check out Sage Kotsenburg guesting on the Jimmy Fallon show, who’d have thought that was going to happen 2 weeks ago? The flip side of that is he’s also now on the TMZ ‘stop and search’ list, getting interviewed about the sex in Sochi. You win some, you lose some…

So, hilarious and awesome reading how the Guardian is trying to explain the ‘Holy Crail’ to non-snowboarder readers, less awesome that the Daily Mail feels it needs to start a hate campaign against Ed Leigh. Amazing that the world is ‘tweeting at’ previously unheard of pro-riders, pretty poor that others are getting some pretty drastic hate tweets.

Yes you read right, a couple of weeks ago we reported on Aussie boardercross rider Belle Brockhoff limiting her anti-homophobia protests whilst in Sochi, but now she’s back in the news as the target of some pretty grim internet trolling.

One giant douche tweeted, ‘I’m right behind Putin, you should break a leg and get locked in the slammer,’ another bigot called her an ‘aggressive dyke.’

We at Whitelines would like to put it out there that we don’t care which way you’re sliding, just as long as it’s on a snowboard. And Belle Brockhoff is hard as nails, not many people could get back up and do another race straight after this crash:

Luckily she managed to keep a sense of humour about the whole thing, saying she found the tweets ‘funny.’ Good on her; just saying ‘fuck it’ (or huck it) has always been part of what makes snowboarding rad.

But best of all, snowboarding once again proved that it’s greater than anyone standing against any one rider with a flood of supportive tweets over-whelming the ‘haters.’ Even Rihanna weighed in in support of Belle’s Principle 6 pro-human rights campaign. Now that is awesome.