The anger that used to be his constant companion comes and goes now, bubbling up in the starting gate when he needs something extra to push his 41-year-old body down the mountain.

Twenty years ago, that anger drove Shaun Palmer into a 24-7 obsession to be the best at everything _ snowboard rider, mountain bike daredevil, businessman, punk rocker, partier.

A near-death experience, a bunch of bad breaks and plain old time have mellowed him. But he is still standing on the snowboard in that starting gate, trying to make the Olympics, ready to show that, yes, Shaun Palmer is still a factor in the sport he helped create.

"Young kids don't even know who I am anymore, but I don't care," Palmer said. "I just really wanted to make the Olympics this year. That's all I want to do."

Palmer is one of the _ if not THE _ original snowboarding rebel _ the guy they named the video game after and who showed that, yes, in that true, grungy, Extreme Sports fashion, you can win all the races, woo all the fans, make all the money and still come off like you really don't care.

One of his contemporaries, eight-time U.S. team member Rob Kingwill, said Palmer once told him a story about meeting the guys from Motley Crue.

"He said, 'Those guys didn't do drugs. I did drugs," Kingwill recalls. "It was the level of the party, how hard he pushed himself and how he got on the gnarly drug side. To go from there, to where he's matured enough where he sees the Olympics as a capstone. He thinks being on an Olympic podium is where he belongs, that that should be part of his story."

No one should mistake Palmer for those in his generation who thought their sport didn't belong in the Olympics, would lose its edge by commingling with what's widely perceived as the stodgiest, most buttoned-up sports institution on the planet.

Because all Palmer really wanted, since he was about 17, was to show he was the best. At everything. And he recognized early that nothing says that better than having an Olympic gold medal hanging around your neck.

"That's how I felt about all the sports, and I took it to a level where I wanted to beat everyone in the world at everything," Palmer said. "I was just on a mission. There was probably a lot of anger and frustration in there. I found an outlet."

There was a USA Today story in the late '90s that asked, below a picture of Palmer, "Is this man the World's Greatest Athlete?" Often lost in the retelling is that it was Palmer himself who suggested he was.

Mountain bike champion. Five-time world champion in snowboarding. Six-time X-Games champion. The list goes on.