By Terry Golway

February 24, 2002 | 7:00 p.m

Until recent events in Salt Lake City, I thought a half-pipe was

the nicotine-delivery system my ancestors used back in the ould sod. Ach, they were so poor they had to settle for a scrawny little half-pipe while the lords and their ladies sat around tables groaning with fine meats and exotic wines while they sucked on full pipes overflowing with imported tobbacky. Who knew that a half-pipe is not, in fact, a relic of Old World poverty, but an actual competitive sport-indeed, a sport bearing the coveted imprimatur of the august International Olympic Committee? This news came as a surprise to your dutiful correspondent, who always assumed that all those slackers with snowboards were just having a little fun and not actually training for the day when Bob Costas would interview them in front of a fake fire at the (trumpets, please) "Olympic Winter Games on NBC." I would not presume to judge the Olympian worthiness of half-pipers, who seem, in any case, like a nice bunch of young men and women. It is curious, however, that this made-for-cable-television event whose paternity can be traced to malls in suburban America now takes its place alongside ski-jumping, ice hockey and figure-skating as a recognized Olympic sport. Equally curious, in a way that would seem to rule out coincidence, is the American dominance of the seemingly endless half-pipe events. Many things may be said about the United States (just read the European newspapers), but few have ever accused this nation of being a winter-sport powerhouse. We do the high jump, not the ski jump. Our medal totals at the Winter Games generally put us in the middle of the pack, alongside the Poles, the Dutch and the Bulgarians. Now, if you're, say, Jack Welch, and you were the head of the gigantic corporation that spent hundreds of millions of dollars to televise the Olympic Games, would you be content to see the Finns and the Norwegians and the Swiss piling up the gold, silver and bronze? Would it not worry you that those hundreds of millions of dollars, which could have been used to clean up the Hudson River, might be wasted if American television viewers decided that an Olympic Games dominated by blond cross-country skiers and Teutonic luge teams just can't compete with a rerun of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire ? Of course, Mr. Welch no longer heads General Electric, having been promoted to the ranks of the Great American Authors Who Have Laid Off Thousands and Lived to Laugh About It. But the mega-Olympic deal was done under his watch, and his successors are left with the tab. And you can be pretty sure that the thought of  broadcasts dominated by the 4-by-7.5-kilometer relay in the women's biathlon scared the Nielsens out of them. And so we have the half-pipe, an all-American, demographically correct ratings builder-just like short-track speed skating (a Winter Games version of roller derby) and hot-dog mogul skiing. The I.O.C. took Yankee dollars and then gave its white-gloved thumbs-up to a junk sport the Yanks could claim as their own, just as the Scandinavians own the aptly named Nordic events. You may think that's a little too conspiratorial, but then again, so is the notion that you can bribe a few I.O.C. members to get them to pick your city to host the Games. Ah, but all that's forgotten now, what with the U.S. taking home bushels of medals and threatening the Germans for first place in the medal standings. It may be truly stated that I cannot do whatever it is that a half-piper does, and therefore should not speak so disparagingly of the half-pipe's practitioners. Yes, but rather than leap around on a snowboard for no apparent reason, I practice a form of journalism known as newspaper writing. And while newspaper writing is not yet an Olympic event-and if you think the figure-skating judges are a rough crowd, you ought to meet the Pulitzer Prize gang-there is never any shortage of non-practitioners who are more than happy to disparage my admittedly pathetic efforts, and that doesn't even include close relatives. Being old enough to remember Franz Klammer, Jean-Claude Killy and Peggy Fleming, I suppose I'm just too grouchy to appreciate the new, like, way-cool Olympic Games. Give me something with sweat and blood, with grim determination, with frozen snot hanging from the beards of exhausted men and East German women. Give me some real sports. Yes, give me curling! * * *  Speaking of being old, in this space last week I confused Frank Cashen, the former general manager of the New York Mets, with Fred Wilpon, Mr. Cashen's onetime boss and the team's co-owner.