If you've never bothered watching the Winter Olympics, think again, pour yourself a glühwein and tune into this February's frozen extravaganza from Salt Lake City. You may have been put off by the usual procession of tanned foreigners having medals slipped around their muscular necks while the British team are back home before the postcards. But, with snowboarding a recent addition to the Winter Olympics, this year you could get to see Lesley McKenna - Britain's very own half-pipe ninja, and ranked third in the world - standing up there on the central podium with a medal round her neck.

On a bright, bracing mid-November morning in Tignes, where the snow was hard and the sky clear blue, I'd just turned up for a lesson with Lesley, red-faced and out of breath already - and that was just from carting my board down the side of the 200m-long half-pipe, where she had spent the past three hours pushing her body to perform feats of lung-popping endurance, sometimes on icy terra firma but mostly spinning like a dice several metres above it.

We took the button-tow up to the edge of the Grande Motte, the imposing glacier that dominates the giant valley in which Tignes lies. Lesley shot off while I, drawing on all the skills I'd built up in the two years it had taken me to become an intermediate snowboarder, fell flat on my face and knocked someone else off the tow. Hadn't done that in ages. Must be nerves. Fortunately, Lesley didn't see.

We headed off to the right of the formidable-looking boardercross track, where the pros were hurtling round the banked curves and speeding over the jumps in a way that suggested they weren't intimidated by my presence at all.

"I get the impression you're not using your toes and your heels nearly enough," said Lesley. "You've got to really dig them in." The route narrowed and wound sharply as I followed her advice - and an astonishing thing happened: I turned at speed in control, or at least in more control than normal, and even managed to weave past a few fellow boarders. Up ahead, Lesley swung from frontside to fakie and back again - while adjusting her gloves and hat - then grabbed a bit of air, then another. Talk about making things look effortless. She could probably have gone down these slopes reading a newspaper and still set some kind of record.

"You're far too upright," said Lesley, doing a sort of slick bending movement, and suddenly I was reminded of a fact on her website (lesleymckenna.co.uk) - this is the woman who won the Scottish disco dancing championships when she was 10. Clearly, dangerous sports are in her blood. "You should be in more of a crouch," she added. Seconds later, I'd stopped impersonating a pillarbox and, again, the improvement was instant. I grabbed some air and a loud cheer went up, followed by several wolf whistles, but they were for some Finnish bloke on the half-pipe who had just done a 1080. That's three complete spins in the air.

"Stick your arms out in front of you more," came the final piece of advice, "and have your palms facing the slope." This proved probably the best tip of all, chiefly because such a position forces you to crouch more, but also because you feel as if you look like a proper snowboarder, and that's a great confidence-booster in a sport where every mistake is punished in public.

Tignes used to have a reputation for being a fairly brutal, purpose-built Alpine resort, and whoever designed it certainly tried to bring out the full beauty of concrete. But attempts to prettify and reinvent it as a more welcoming resort with more attractions are paying off. It's rightly proud of its snowpark, missing no opportunity to remind you that this is the biggest snowboarding area in Europe, boasting a boardercross section, quarter-pipes, two half-pipes, plus table-tops, hips, spines and hand rails. Should you fancy it, there's also ice diving in the resort's lake, where Luc Besson filmed some of The Big Blue, and a 10-pin bowling alley that has the added challenge of requiring you to keep the scores yourself with pencil and paper (tip: lay off the sauce).

As Tignes is so high up, there's also a good chance of early snow, although in mid-November the lifts were closing at around 2.45pm since there wasn't a whole lot of it about - and it wasn't possible to cross into Val d'Isère and use the full 310 staggering kilometres of runs that make up L'Espace Killy, as the combined might of the two resorts is known. Although it can't rival Val d'Isère for nightlife, Tignes is cheaper than its big, noisy neighbour and, importantly, boasts far fewer Hooray Henrys (and Hooray Jimmys, their fast-growing Scottish equivalent).

Over dinner in the Hotel Curling - a four-star gaffe with young, mostly British and friendly staff - Lesley let me into the secret of the half-pipe. "Speed," she said. "The faster you go, the more you'll get away with. Speed is everything."

Now able to do linked turns, thanks to Lesley's tuition, rather than just a series of linked recoveries, I headed for the snowpark the next day, keeping arms out, palms down, weight low and toes and heels primed to dig in deep. The world's most accomplished air hounds were out in force and it was as if gravity had taken the day off.

In this charged atmosphere, I managed a table-top, a spine and then - brimming with confidence - sped towards a jump. Wipeout! Ah well, still got a long way to go.

McKenna's top tips

· Don't be too stiff and upright - bend your knees and crouch down more.

· Keep your arms in front of you.

· Have your palms facing the snow.

· Really dig your toes and heels in when you turn.

· In the half-pipe, speed is everything.

Way to go

Getting there: Thomson Holidays (0870 6061470, thomson-ski.co.uk and thomson-snowboarding.co.uk) offers seven nights in the chalet Pre du Lac in Tignes from £299pp including return flights, transfers and chalet board with free wine.

Further information: tignes.net. Flight time to Chambery or Lyon: 1 hrs, transfer from Chambery to Tignes 3 hrs, from Lyon 4 hrs.
Country code: 00 33.
Time difference: GMT +1 hr.
£1 =10.12 French francs.