Well, the women's snowboard cross, first-ever in the Olympics, I believe, just confirmed what I've always thought about Americans. We may be hegemons, and we may come out on top, but we celebrate it with the embarrassing tendency to "showboat", as the commentators would say.
Attention during the women's snowboard cross was on the only American, of course, in this case some 20-yr-old curly-haired blonde named Lindsey Jacobellis. She's world champ and in the final, she pulled out ahead of everyone else with some crafty maneuvering and was very, very far ahead near the end. It was clear she was getting the gold. No one had a chance of catching her, partly because Maelle Ricker, a Canadian with the fastest qualifying time, crashed out and had to be taken away in a stretcher (we didn't hear about her though... 
she's Canadian, after all) and fellow Canadian Dominique Maltais crashed into the net, leaving only Swedish Tanja Frieden far behind.
And then "Lucky Lindsey" revealed her true American side. Coming up over the last hill, she grabbed her board and did a little twist worthy of the half-pipe or X-Games, landed unevenly and crashed. As she stopped skidding and got back up, Frieden passed her and won the gold. Jacobellis ended up with silver (the girl who crashed into the net got bronze). Everyone was humiliated for her. You could see her parents screaming in the stands for her to get up, then realizing it was too late.
She'd later claim that she was trying to stabilize herself and it "didn't work", but everyone, even the American-centric commentators, could tell that she was showing off, thinking the gold was certain and she could be a little flamboyant. One wonders what this means for American foreign and economic policy. We're pretty far ahead of the competition right now (India? China? the EU?) but if we showboat we might just crash and burn while the "slow and steady" slide on past.
