Philip Hersh
For the first time in my journalistic memory–which includes all eight Winter Olympics since 1980–I have no indelible single memory of the Games, just bits and pieces.
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Saw Bode Miller fail to finish a race. Nothing new there. Miller is the most pathetic failure in Olympic history. Saw the men’s and women’s figure skating finals turn into sad flopfests. Saw Chinese pairs skater Zhang Dan hit the ice like a rock after failing on a daring move, only to shake it off, start skating again and finish with a silver medal.
Saw Michelle Kwan, 25, leave the Olympics after 30 minutes on the ice, convinced she didn’t belong here with a body battered by injury. Saw Norway’s Kjetil Andre Aamodt, at 34 with a body that also had been battered by injury, win a third straight gold medal in the super-G, showing Miller what it means to be a great athlete and not the punch line to 1,000 jokes.
Saw Shizuka Arakawa, Japan’s first figure skating champion, wearing her gold medal and being carried on the shoulders of teammates in the Closing Ceremony. Saw a Russian pairs team that trains in Bensenville, Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, deliver two impeccable performances to win gold 16 months after Totmianina lay motionless, with some fearing she might be dead, after falling 8 feet to the ice when Marinin stumbled.
Saw Turin’s Olympic slogan, “Passion Lives Here,” finally prove other than an oxymoron during the final night of short-track speedskating, when the Palavela arena rocked and U.S. skater Apolo Anton Ohno rolled (literally, with a rolling start before winning the 500) to gold and bronze medals.
Saw mountains gleaming with snow and this introverted, pensive city turned into a darker, if glistening, gray with rain.
Saw lots of things in the 2006 Winter Olympics worth remembering for a while, but nothing that was unforgettable.
Melissa Isaacson
The snow was falling not in flakes but in big wet clumps, the kind of snow that looks pretty to everyone who’s not in it. The kind that accumulates on your seat when you stand up to brush yourself off. The kind that I never had seen before, not even after a lifetime in Chicago, until last week at the medals plaza the night Shani Davis received his gold medal for the 1,000 meters in long-track speedskating.
Of the three pairs of shoes I brought to Turin–very warm snow boots, waffle-bottomed hiking boots and clogs with no real redeeming quality other than comfort–I chose the clogs, not knowing that morning a blizzard was brewing. But with wet feet, destroyed clogs and the accumulated cynicism of “The Shani Crisis: Day 13,” I hunkered down.
And something sort of weird happened.
After warring the last four years with the powers-that-be of Olympic sports in the United States–to the point where Davis felt compelled to take his training across the border and his mother, Cherie, to wear tip-to-toe orange Holland gear while watching her son skate–he seemed deeply moved by the pomp and circumstance.
So was I. There’s something about watching the American flag being raised in a foreign country while the national anthem is being played that stirs patriotism in even the biggest cynics with even the coldest feet.
There is no way of knowing exactly how Shani was feeling as he bowed his head. But for the first time since the Olympics began, he sounded like a 23-year-old kid rather than a man worn down by controversy.
“Yeah, I mean here it is, you know? It’s finalized,” he said when asked if it had hit him yet that he is an Olympic gold medalist.
With snow on his hat and coat and eyelashes, he flashed a smile and said, “I’ll never take it off until I get the box, so it’s going to be going a lot of places with me now.”
Rick Morrissey
The Olympic spirit is about effort.
That seems obvious until the Games arrive and you see a hot-dogging snowboarder blowing a chance at a gold medal, speedskaters sniping at each other and a banned Austrian ski coach fleeing the country after a police raid for drugs.
But then you see an American skier come back from a horrific crash, and your faith in athletics is renewed at least a little bit.
On Feb. 13, Lindsey Kildow was going through a downhill training run at San Sicario when one of her ski edges caught on the hard-packed snow, sending her down the mountain at 50 m.p.h. When she came to rest, she was a mess. She also was unconscious for a while. She was airlifted to a Turin hospital. The initial diagnosis on the mountain had been massive head trauma and a fractured pelvis.
She walked out of the hospital the next day with a badly bruised back and a firm resolve.
The day after that, she stood at the top of the same mountain, trying to convince herself she needed to overcome the fear of falling again. She pushed off on her poles at the start of the race and headed downhill. When she got to the area where she had crashed, she felt a cold shot of fear, she said later, and who could blame her?
But she kept going, past the hill and past the fear, and made it to the end on her feet. She finished eighth in the downhill, but that wasn’t the point.
“I learned that your body can go through a lot and that you can push yourself as far as you want to push it, as long as you’re not going to blow out your knee,” she said. “Your body has a lot of pain tolerance.
“Now I know my limits, and I’ll push myself harder next time.”
She did. The Olympics weren’t a rousing success for Kildow. She had medal hopes and came away with nothing, unless you count the admiration of millions of people.
The Olympic spirit is about effort. Thanks for the reminder, Lindsey.
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Michael Kellams
Here’s the deal with any Olympics: Like professional wrestling, the athletes inevitably seem to end up divided into two groups.
You have your heroes, who have overcome every manner of obstacle, from opportunity to injury to money to just simply getting old.
And then you have your villains, who seem to gloat and glory-hound their way through what is supposed to be the purest form of competition, athletics as an expression of peaceful coexistence. Just being here should be enough. Winning is the cherry on top.
There just aren’t many, you know, “normal” people. For every Joey Cheek offering his superhuman giving for the betterment of those less fortunate, there’s a Chad Hedrick, winning and scheming to capitalize on what likely will be his fleeting fame. And that’s one team, the speedskaters.
Surprisingly, my most indelible moment of “normal” came during a spectacularly bad night of ice dancing. It was a night filled with crashes that you just don’t normally see, and not just because you don’t normally watch.
About a half-dozen couples spent some not-so-quality time together during the original dance competition. The most incredible crash came courtesy of a Canadian pair. Patrice Lauzon had Marie-France Dubreuil in a fantastic spin, but Dubreuil couldn’t keep her grip. She flew like a model airplane out of control, landing hard on her hip. Her Games were over. They withdrew before the final the next night.
Like Dubreuil, “normal” was just about to crash the unlikeliest of parties.
Italian pair Maruizio Margaglio and Barbara Fusar Poli were nearly finished with their program when Margaglio lost his footing. Fusar Poli came tumbling down on top of him.
When they got up, he was lucky they were figure skaters and not biathletes. Her stare lasted only about 30 seconds, but you knew exactly what she would be feeling for a lifetime. Her dream of Olympic gold was gone. And it was all his fault, just like when he dropped her in Salt Lake City. They won bronze then; they wouldn’t be so fortunate here.
Through all of the costumes straight out of “Beastmaster” and makeup made for a drag night on Miami Beach, through all of the mounting and dismounting and mounting again that is ice dancing, I found complete normalcy in Fusar Poli’s eyes: anger, forgiveness and ultimately, acceptance. I could relate. Finally.