The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Ross Rebagliati    SNOWBOARDING

Olympic Highlight: In 1998 he won the giant slalom but was stripped of his gold medal by the IOC after he tested positive for marijuana; arbitrators reinstated him as champion

His gold medal nearly went up in smoke, but Rebagliati still rides his board. Todd Korol

Rebagliati would like to be remembered as the first person to win an Olympic snowboarding gold medal. He knows, however, that his legacy will be significantly more complicated, that he confirmed the negative stereotypes about the sport he loves when trace amounts of marijuana were detected in his system during a routine drug test. Three days after he won it, the medal was taken from him. "A lot of people probably weren't surprised," he says. "There's the idea that snowboarding's a bad-boy sport. If I had been a figure skater, it would have been more of a shock."

Rebagliati got his medal back two days later after a panel of arbitrators determined that marijuana was not banned by the IOC. (It is now.) "It wouldn't have mattered if I was burning one at the top of the run -- it wasn't in the rules," he says.

Now 30 and retired from racing, Rebagliati lives in his native Whistler, B.C., with his girlfriend, Jennifer Friesen. In addition to endorsing Corum watches and Arc-Teryx outdoor gear, he's on the committee for Vancouver's bid for the 2010 Winter Games and is working on a documentary film on the history of snowboarding. He rides the mountains around Whistler as often as he can, and he still ruminates on his unique place in Olympic history. "It was so intense," he says. "I mean, who cares what one person thinks? But a whole planet? I think about it every day."

—Mark Beech