Torin Yater-Wallace, competing at the Winter X Games, can't wait for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. "I'll be in the prime of my career, the top of my game and close to being the best out there," he says. ( RJ Sangosti )

Torin Yater-Wallace likes the ring of it: Olympian.

Aspen's homegrown halfpipe-skiing superstar will be 18 when his sport debuts at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.

When the International Olympic Committee announced last week that it was embracing ski halfpipe for the 2014 Games in Sochi, an army of young ski-shod aerialists raced to the pipe and started spring training.

In three years, their sport -- which has long endured in the shadow of board-riding rock stars such as Shaun White -- will debut on the world's greatest stage with higher airs and smoother spins than the side-saddled snowboarders.

"I'm really excited," Yater-Wallace said last week. "I'll be in the prime of my career, the top of my game and close to being the best out there."

The skier's soaring airs and clean landings earned him a silver medal at the Winter X Games this year and a gold medal at the FIS freestyle World Cup last month in La Plagne, France.

The IOC's announcement was somewhat expected, with many of the pipe's top skiers already honing their FIS cred by traveling the globe to compete in halfpipe contests that still don't pack nearly the punch of their sport's top event, the Winter X Games in Aspen.

Skier Sarah Burke, Canada's perennially podiumed halfpipe queen and last year's World Cup halfpipe champion, won last month's halfpipe World Cup in France. At age 28, Burke shows no signs of loosening her grip on her "world's best" status. But when Sochi arrives, the pioneer of women's pipe skiing will be 31.

"It's definitely intimidating. The way it is right now, I'm competing with teenagers," she said, declining to mention that she's also still winning. "I don't bounce as easily as I used to or like the younger kids do. But I'm definitely up for the challenge. This has been a goal of mine for a long, long time."

Helping Burke -- as well as the countless teenagers in her wake -- is the proliferation of airbags and foam pits in training. Without threat of bone-shattering mistakes, athletes can use the airbags and foam pits to dial-in a trick's muscular mechanics.

The new training tools as well as the Olympic horizon promise a population boom in halfpipe skiers. Look for more 22-foot Olympic superpipes across the country and definitely more high-flying, Olympics-focused crowds in those pipes.

"People are going to start showing up next year and start skiing halfpipe. But it's not like they are going to be popping up and winning. It takes a long time to get good at halfpipe," said Simon Dumont, 24, a decade-long veteran of competitive pipe skiing with six X Games medals.

Training facilities such as Woodward at Copper Mountain and clubs such as Yater-Wallace's Aspen Valley Ski & Snowboard Club and the Ski & Snowboard Club Vail already are hosting Olympic-ready pipe skiers who are barely teens. And there are pipe veterans in Colorado who help blaze trails and inspire the crop of up-and-comers, including Carbondale's Pete Olenick and Dumont, who both train in Breckenridge.

"If we continue on the path we are on right now, we have a good chance to really put some local kids on the 2014 team," said Ben Brown, director of Woodward at Copper.