KUALA LUMPUR, Feb. 18 -- At least in the last 24 hours, Malaysians have cared less about football. What sat at the top of Google's search list instead was a sport that not a single local can play, even if they wanted to: snowboarding.

The reason is Su Yiming, the 21-year-old Chinese snowboarding sensation who is turning Malaysian heads towards the TV to tune in for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. This tournament rarely gets attention simply because Malaysia is a tropical country.

At the time of writing, Google Trends analytics showed the snowboarding event at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics had over 50,000 searches, a 1,000 per cent jump in just 10 hours.

The search volume was 30,000 higher than that for the Benfica vs Real Madrid...