TORINO 2006 OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES, Feb 10-26

[BOREALIS]

Parody - - Bode Miller "TORINO 2006 Recognition"

[BOREALIS]

Interesting story, first I head of it.

[craddock]

Czech sports trickster gate crashs Olympics: report Fri Mar 3, 12:30 PM ET

PRAGUE (AFP) - A Czech sports trickster reportedly took part in last month's Winter Olympics after borrowing a starting number from a Japanese competitor.

The Czech daily newspaper Sport carried a photograph of 38-year-old Josef Panuska from the Turin games wearing number 365 in the men's 50km cross country skiing event.

Panuska then surprised race organisers and the police when he arrived at the finishing line after 7 hours and 54 minutes with the stands long emptied of spectators.

Among Panuska's previous antics was his participation in the 2004 Athens Olympics marathon, which he completed in 5 hours 18 minutes.

[BOREALIS]

Paralympic Flame Lit: Passion Continues in Torino

.
In a double ceremony linked up with Rome, the countdown
for the start of the Paralympic Winter Games has officially started.

Mar 2 2006


A new flame is burning in Torino.
It is the one for the IX Paralympic Winter Games in Torino 2006, lit yesterday during an evocative ceremony that, live on Sportitalia from 18,30, symbolically linked Rome and Torino.

In the capital, in the wonderful setting of the Arch of Costantine, the presenter Ilaria D’Amico opened the celebration, explaining the meaning of the Roman presence: the fact that from a historical point of view the Paralympic Games were born in the shade of the Colosseum in 1960. This aspect was the central point of Rome’s mayor Walter Veltroni’s speech and of the President of the Paralympic Committee (as well CONI’S Vice-President) Luca Pancalli, who remembered with pleasure how athletes of the last Olympic Winter Games often invited the public to follow the Paralympic Winter Games.

An example of this was Giorgio Rocca, who, during his last interview on the snow of Sestriere amiably told the journalists that he “left the podium to the great Paralympic Winter Games champions”.
On the other hand, the ceremony in Torino was held in the very central Piazza della Repubblica, in front of a large audience, welcomed by the city’s young volunteers, in cooperation with the Fondazione CRT. Also in the city of the Mole, the parterre was full of personalities: from the President of the Paralympic Winter Games Organising Committee Tiziana Nasi to the President of TOROC Valentino Castellani, to the mayor Sergio Chiamparino to the president of the Provincia Saitta, the executive vice-president of IPC Gonzalez and the president of the Fondazione CRT Comba. The president of the Regione Mercedes Bresso, the IPC president Luca Pancalli and the Town councillor for Sport of the Provincia di Roma Attilio Bellucci took part in the ceremony.

There was a lot of excitement both in Rome and in Torino. The past and the present played an important part in the lighting of the Paralympic Torch because it was first taken to “veteran” athletes, who are now active, and then to promising young athletes with a disability. At the same time that the sacred Flame of Olympia was symbolically and magically lit in Rome, in Torino the Torch was greeted by street artists “La Salamandre”, who in a real “fire dance” passed it to Giuliano Kuten, who is an athlete with six Paralympic experiences.

At this point a real procession that, along with the Olympic Torch, crossed the square and took Via Milano passing through two curtains of celebrating crowds, heading for the Town Hall. In the third leg of its journey the Paralympic Torch was then handed over to Leo Sette, cross country skiing athlete, who in the last bit of the journey then passed it to Fabrizio Calza, 14-year-old mini basketball player.

The Ceremony closed inside the Town Hall. The Torch will be kept there by the Mayor, except for a brief two-day-stay on Monte Rosa, until March 8, when it will begin its journey through the city carried by 150 different torchbearers.

The journey will finish on March 10, when it will enter the Stadio Olimpico, during the Torino 2006 IX Paralympic Winter Games Opening Ceremony.

Silvia Bruno


http://www.paralympicgames.torino2006.org/ENG/ParalympicGames/news/news_ita117058.html

[BOREALIS]

OK, got the dead brain cells swept out, lots of room now to download more info......

Bring on the next torch!

[BullNBear52]

A Toast to Torino, With a Last Bicerin
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
International Herald Tribune
Though it was not the ideal Winter Olympic host, Turin does happen to have an ideal cure for the inevitable morning-after letdown.

On Monday, as some stores in the city center were already dismantling their "Turin 2006" displays, a small café in the Piazza della Consolata was drawing a crowd as regulars and Olympic stragglers alike wedged into its cozy, wood- paneled confines for a glass of bicerin, the frothy local brew of espresso, cream and hot chocolate that gives one a gentle shake, instead of a slap, after sunup.

With the eyes now closer to wide open, it's easier to take one last look at the winners and losers in Turin.

Best performance on snow: Honorable mention goes to the Italian mountain crews who pulled all-nighter after all-nighter to clear fresh snow off the Alpine race courses. As for those who got the real medals, the German biathlete Michael Greis has a strong case to make after winning three gold medals and forcing the once-unbeatable Ole Einar Bjoerndalen to settle for second place in two individual events.

Michaela Dorfmeister, an Austrian, also deserves support after winning her first two Olympic golds in her final Games. But the races she won - the downhill and super-giant slalom - were strangely lacking in suspense and sparkle on a slope that sometimes looked better suited to the recreational set. Her fellow Austrian Benjamin Raich provided better entertainment. After wilting in the final slalom run of the combined, he handled the pressure beautifully in the giant slalom and slalom, on brutally difficult courses that many of his rivals failed even to finish.

Best performance on ice: It's hard to ignore five medals in five events, which is what the Canadian Cindy Klassen won in the speed skating. It is hard to ignore three gold medals each for the South Korean short-track skaters Hyun Soo Ahn and Jin Sun Yu. But there's a certain amount of injustice in the fact that athletes who just happen to compete in sports that pile on the events get more glory (Do we really need a 1,000-meter race and a 1,500-meter race?) I'm going for quality over quantity, and for silver over gold. The Chinese pairs skater Zhang Dan took the sort of fall that usually ends seasons in the opening moments of her free program. But she managed to grit her teeth and skate well enough to earn a place on the podium, which she reached with help from her partner, Zhang Hao, who carried her across the ice.

Worst performance on snow: You're thinking Bode Miller. Just about everyone's thinking Bode Miller, yet at least Miller was true to his stubborn, stubble-faced self. He made it clear that he was into his alternative version of the Olympic experience more than he was into the medals and proved it by hitting plenty of bars and no podiums as he gave his sponsors and coaches the wrong kind of chills by going 0-for-5. But the Norwegians, the traditional Nordic kings, were fully committed to winning, and for the first time in 18 years, they ended without a single victory in cross-country skiing or its gun- toting offspring, biathlon. They struggled with their wax choices. They struggled with their health. They struggled with their aim, with one woman biathlete, Gunn Margit Andreassen, shooting at the wrong targets.

Worst performance on ice: You can play the blame game with Japan's medal-free speed skaters or the Canadian men's hockey team, the defending champion that slumped to seventh after failing to score in 11 of its last 12 periods of play. But it's hardest to shake the image of Sasha Cohen, the seemingly sublime American figure skater, facing the music in the free program and botching her first two jumps. Seldom has a silver looked more like a booby prize.

Best performance in thin air: Historians might opt for Han Xiaopeng, the aerialist extraordinaire who became the first Chinese man to win a freestyle skiing gold medal. Sentimentalists and scientists might opt for Alisa Camplin, the telegenic Australian aerialist who took the bronze in the women's competition on a knee that had been reconstructed with a ligament taken from a cadaver. The X Games set would surely opt for Shaun White, the American snowboarder with the flame- colored hair who set the halfpipe alight with a series of tricks that could pass for a foreign language: frontside lien air, McTwist, back-to-back 1080, frontside 900 and backside 900.

But this traditionalist is casting his vote for another 19-year-old instead. The Austrian ski jumper Thomas Morgenstern won the large hill competition with a 140-meter effort on his final jump, just good enough to beat his compatriot Andreas Kofler by a tenth of a point.

In the team competition, Morgenstern again needed something special at the last moment and produced it, as his 140.5-meter effort gave Austria (and himself) another gold medal.

Worst performance in thin air: Lindsey Jacobellis might have been true to her sport's means-over-end creed when she went for much more style than she needed off the penultimate jump with a huge lead. But you only get one chance to be the first woman to win the Olympic snowboard cross. When Jacobellis ended up in the snow after giving her board that now infamous extra grab and twist, the pioneer who ended up in the history books was Tanja Frieden of Switzerland.

Best performance on thin ice: Double nominee Miller gets his prize here: not for handling all that unwelcome Olympic attention off the slopes in Sestriere with aplomb (he bombed) but for handling what looked like genuine disaster on the slopes in Sestriere. Apparently out of control in the super- G, Miller flailed toward the side of the course at high speed: one ski trailing behind high in the air at a right angle. The vast majority of other mortals would have gone hurtling into the safety nets or the forest. Miller missed a gate but somehow maintained his balance on one ski and eventually got everything back where it belonged, begging the question: "If Miller is that amazing an athlete, why can't he make it all the way to the bottom more often?"

Worst performance on thin ice: You'd think the Austrian Nordic team would have mapped out the highest road possible after a maid stumbled across alleged blood transfusion equipment in one of their residences in Salt Lake City after the last Olympics were over. That discovery was enough to earn an Austrian coach, Walter Mayer, an eight-year ban from the Olympics but not enough to earn him a ban from the Austrian program. If he had not been silly enough to come visit his athletes at these Games, triggering a late- night doping raid from the Italian police, he might still be on the payroll.

[BullNBear52]

Dumbing down...

NBC's Olympic viewership falls 37 percent from 2002 Salt Lake City games
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer


NEW YORK (AP) -- NBC's prime-time Olympics coverage from Turin ended up averaging 20.2 million viewers per night, a 37 percent decline from the Salt Lake City games four years ago, with an even steeper decline among young viewers.

The closing ceremonies on Sunday had only 14.8 million viewers, and was clobbered by ABC's finale of "Dancing With the Stars."

It was a disheartening showing for NBC in prime time. The network had promised its advertisers an average of between 12 and 14 ratings points for the games and barely made it: the average rating was 12.2, according to Nielsen Media Research. Each ratings point represent 1,102,000 households.

NBC had expected ratings to go down from Salt Lake City due to the time difference and rise in patriotism following the 2001 terrorist attacks, but plainly hoped the drop wouldn't be as steep. Salt Lake City averaged 31.9 million viewers a night, while the 1998 Nagano games averaged 25.1 million.

The network said its cable and Internet coverage showed growth, slightly mitigating the prime-time problems.

Among viewers aged 18-to-49-years old, ratings for the Turin games were down 45 percent. Advertisers are most interested in these young viewers, who abandoned the Olympics in large numbers for Fox's "American Idol."

In fact, among this youthful demographic, NBC didn't even win in prime time last week -- Fox did. That's an unheard of slump for a television event as popular as the Olympics.

Still, the Olympic ratings were more than double NBC's prime-time average for regular programming, and the network hopes it was able to reach enough people with ads for new programs like "Conviction" to give them strong starts.

For the week, NBC averaged 19.5 million viewers (11.8 rating, 18 share), Fox had 15.6 million (9.1, 14), ABC had 11.3 million (7.1, 11), CBS had 10 million (6.6, 10), Univision had 4.4 million (2.2, 3), the WB had 2.8 million (1.9, 3), UPN had 2.6 million (1.8, 3), Telemundo had 1.1 million (0.6, 1) and Pax TV had 410,000 (0.3, 0).

Even though NBC's "Nightly News" won the evening-news ratings race with 9.7 million viewers (6.7 rating, 13 share), it didn't get much boost from the Olympics. ABC's "World News Tonight" had 9.1 million viewers (6.3, 12) and the "CBS Evening News" had 8.3 million (5.8, 11).

A ratings point represents 1,102,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 110.2 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Feb. 20-26, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "American Idol" (Wednesday), Fox, 31.68 million; "American Idol" (Tuesday), Fox, 30.16 million; "Dancing With the Stars" (Sunday), ABC, 27.22 million; "Winter Olympics" (Thursday), NBC, 25.72 million; "Winter Olympics" (Tuesday), NBC, 25.07 million; "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 24.76 million; "American Idol" (Thursday), Fox, 23.37 million; "Winter Olympics" (Monday), NBC, 22.48 million; "Dancing With the Stars" (Thursday), ABC, 17.7 million; "Winter Olympics" (Saturday), 16.54 million.

On the Net:

http://www.nielsenmedia.com

Updated on Tuesday, Feb 28, 2006 4:39 pm EST

[BullNBear52]

Olympic flag raised in Vancouver for 2010 Games

By JEREMY HAINSWORTH, Associated Press Writer


VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- The Olympic flag was raised in Vancouver on Tuesday, greeted by the cheers on thousands while four years of preparations await for the 2010 Winter Games.

"Ten years of dreaming and the flag is finally ours," said John Furlong, the Vancouver Organizing Committee chief executive.

The flag was presented to quadriplegic Mayor Sam Sullivan on Sunday during the closing ceremony of the Turin Games. The flag was placed into a special attachment on Sullivan's wheelchair by International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge. Sullivan took several spins in his wheelchair with the flag.

"Receiving that flag in front of the entire world was one of the most thrilling moments of my life," Sullivan told the crowd at Vancouver City Hall.

On Tuesday, Sullivan, who broke his neck skiing when he was 19, and an honor guard raised the flag, which was caught by a gust of wind as it was unfurled.

Organizers have a plenty of work ahead in the four years before the Winter Games are held in the sprawling, multicultural seaport of Vancouver and Whistler, one of the top ski resorts in North America.

A short-list of headaches includes rising construction costs in an overheated real estate market, a flap over a new highway for the two-hour drive between Vancouver and Whistler, and how to deal with one of Canada's seediest neighborhoods.

Earlier this month, in what Furlong pledged would be the last of such requests, organizers asked federal and provincial authorities for an additional $96 million to cover surging construction costs, raising their projected budget to $580 million. With a local shortage of skilled labor, contractors have dispatched recruiters as far as Europe.

Crucial to the 2010 plan is the upgrading of the scenic, but often congested and dangerous Sea to Sky Highway, which links Vancouver with Whistler over a twisting, mountainous route. Organizers say work is ahead of schedule and will be done by 2009.

But many residents and politicians in affluent West Vancouver are furious the project now calls for an overland, four-lane highway, not a tunnel, through a scenic section of their neighborhood.

Close to Vancouver's vibrant, trendy downtown is a starkly different neighborhood called Downtown Eastside, long a skid-row destination for drifters and drug addicts who frequent dilapidated rooming houses. Organizers have pledged to upgrade the area without causing displacement, but a residents' association predicts rents will soar as landlords and hotel owners try to cash in on the Olympics.

Updated on Tuesday, Feb 28, 2006 5:48 pm EST

[BullNBear52]

Going brain dead on me? I believe we did the same thing after the Summer Olmypic Games 2 years ago.

http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=2891

Relight the torch!

[BOREALIS]

Sport Illustrated's "Best Olympic Photos" part 2

just a few of the 38 photos.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/2006/02/26/gallery.sibestolympics/index.1....


Apolo Anton Ohno, USA Short track Speedskating, men's 500M, gold medal
Feb. 25, 2006


Shani Davis, USA, Speedskating, 1000m, gold medal
Feb. 18, 2006


Sun-Yu Jin and Yun-Mi Kang, KOR, Short Track, 3000m relay
Feb. 12, 2006


Sasha Cohen, USA, Figure Skating, silver medal
Feb. 23, 2006


Gretchen Bleiler and Hannah Teter, USA Halfpipe, silver and gold medals
Feb. 13, 2006


Julia Mancuso, USA, Giant Slalom, gold medal
Feb. 24, 2006


Closing Ceremonies
Feb. 26, 2006

[BOREALIS]

Sport Illustrated's "Best Olympic Photos" part 1

just a few of the 38 photos.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/2006/02/26/gallery.sibestolympics/index.1.....

Dusan Kozisek, CZE, is at the finish line of the Cross Country relay
as the Italian team celebrates in the background.
Feb. 19, 2006


Anja Paerson, SWE Downhill, silver medal
Feb. 15, 2006


Antoine Deneriaz, FRA Downhill, gold medal
Feb. 12, 2006


Maksim Anisimov, BLR Ski Jumping
Feb. 12, 2006


Danny Kass, USA Halfpipe, silver medal
Feb. 12, 2006


USA vs. Russia, Men's prelims.
Feb. 21, 2006

[BOREALIS]

Germany tops in Winter Games medals - again - BUT -
But country in no mood to celebrate expected Olympic success

Updated: 6:44 a.m. ET Feb. 26, 2006


BERLIN - Germany once again won the most Winter Olympic medals with an impressive haul at Turin but there were no wild celebrations nor outbreaks of patriotic fervor back home in a country that has come to expect success.

German newspapers on Sunday soberly noted the country has again topped the unofficial medals table with 29 so far in Turin after 36 in Salt Lake City and 29 at Nagano.

They feted the individual stars who won Saturday’s events — biathlete Michael Greis was crowned “King Michael” for winning a third gold medal and bobsleigh driver Andre Lange was cheered for his second gold in Turin.

But there was no flag-waving in a country uncomfortable about any excessive displays of national pride even though Germans had 11 gold, 12 silver and six bronze medals going into Sunday’s competition.

Instead, there were heavy analytical examinations about the technology advantages that German winter competitors have mixed with reports reflecting worries about Germany’s weakness in core sports such as alpine skiing, figure skating and hockey.

“Triumph at the Olympics -- Germany tops the medals table,” wrote Welt am Sonntag newspaper in a page one headline.

It suggested Germany could be renamed “Biathlon-Republik Deutschland” instead of “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” thanks to biathletes, who won five gold and 11 medals in Turin.

“German medals in Turin due to ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’” wrote the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper in an editorial, borrowing the advertising slogan of a luxury German carmaker.

“As far as the success at the Winter Olympics are concerned, Germans have nothing to complain about. The success is based on a German ‘advantage through technology.’”

While some other countries were delighted with even a single medal, Germans were — in their inimitable fault-finding fashion — able to find something to complain about even in winning.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said the German success in the medals table was in large part due to “second-tier” sports, especially biathlon, luge and bobsleigh, while they have fallen further behind other countries in the main winter sports.

“The success appears to be better than it really is,” the Munich-based daily wrote. “It came mostly on the ice track, in nordic skiing and in biathlon.

“But in the core Winter Olympic sport alpine skiing Germans were far behind the best. In figure skating, we fell further behind than expected. The hockey team had nothing to offer. Germany has to be careful it doesn’t miss out on the new era.”

Katarina Witt, figure skating gold medal winner in 1984 and 1988, countered those complains in Welt am Sonntag: “We should be proud of ourselves for being the best winter sports nation.”


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11573658/

[BOREALIS]

Bemidji, MN plans Bunyan-size Olympic fete

How big was it for Bemidji, Minn., that five fellows from northern Minnesota won an Olympic medal in curling?


Paul Bunyan
Star Tribune illustration

Last update: February 28, 2006 – 1:04 AM

How big was it for Bemidji, Minn., that five fellows from northern Minnesota won an Olympic medal in curling?

It was Bunyanesque.

In a celebration March 12, the city will honor the hometown curlers by adding a 2.5-foot replica of their bronze medal to the Paul Bunyan statue by Lake Bemidji.

"Paul was a curler," Mayor Richard Lehmann said.

And Babe the Blue Ox?

"Babe was a sweep -- a natural, with that tail."

Paul's statue already has a curling cap "like the ones our guys wore," said Teresa Vincent, a city employee. There's a 25-foot broom, too, and someone is turning an old propane tank into a curling stone.

Elaine Hoffman, a Bemidji State administrator, said the medal replica is being produced in industrial technology departments at Bemidji colleges. It will be of lighter materials "but will look like bronze, an exact copy except jumbo," and it will hang on Paul for three weeks before going to the Bemidji Curling Club.

The Olympians -- Pete Fenson, Scott Baird and Joe Polo of Bemidji and John Shuster and Shawn Rojeski from the Chisholm area -- were to return Monday night. The party in two weeks "will be a pretty substantial celebration," Lehmann said. "For us, this is like winning the World Series."


CHUCK HAGA

http://www.startribune.com/120/story/274614.html

[BOREALIS]

What?? Another Olympics - a ParaOlympics - at Turino again, and in March 2006??

The Paralympics, begin March 10 and will be contested in the same places as the Winter Games...

[BullNBear52]

Paralympics
A Life of Peaks and Valleys, and of Hope
By LYNN ZINSER
TURIN, Italy, Feb. 27 — A month after Ralph Green was gunned down on a Brooklyn street corner in 1992, his mother mustered the strength to look ahead.

Until he was shot, Green had escaped the violence that plagued his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He was 15 and a promising high school quarterback. After the shooting, his left leg had to be amputated and he was in a coma.

But Grace Green vowed that her son was not finished.

"I'm not going to let my son be a forgotten one," she told reporters in September 1992. "They say things happen for a purpose. As good as he was in football, he'll be even better in something else."

Sure enough, Ralph Green walked into the Olympic Village here one day last week, leaning on metal crutches, his smile a bright spot on a cold and rainy afternoon. Wearing his United States Paralympic Team jacket, he looked around and marveled at his surroundings.

"The Olympics is something that you see on TV," Green said. "You see the athletes that you see on TV, and they're eating lunch."

Soon, Green will move into his own Olympic Village room, in nearby Sestriere, for the Paralympics, which begin March 10 and will be contested in the same places as the Winter Games. Green, now 28, will compete in all four Alpine skiing disciplines.

He came here last week to help promote the Paralympics, to use his story to raise awareness of sports for those with disabilities. Before he was shot by a stranger, he had never heard of such competitions. He had not even dreamed of skiing.

Once, while flipping through television channels, he said, he stumbled upon a downhill race. "I remember thinking, these guys are crazy," he said.

Green said that with a big laugh, because he took up the sport almost out of the blue in the late 1990's. When he first left the hospital and began to navigate life without his left leg, he tried sports he was familiar with, summer pursuits like track and field. A group took him skiing once in the Poconos, and he hated it.

But a few years later, he decided to try skiing again. He traveled to Winter Park, Colo., where a small ski team for athletes with disabilities trains. He hopped off a chairlift on one ski and two poles with small skis on them. He said it took him an hour and a half to reach the bottom, but something told him this was his sport.

Defying expectations became Green's goal. He moved to Colorado in 2000 and began training. In a few seasons, he made the United States Disabled Alpine Ski Team, the first African-American to do so. Earlier this year, he was named to the Paralympic team. He is sponsored by the National Brotherhood of Skiers and by Home Depot and savors his role as an ambassador for his sport.

Now, when he returns home, which he does often, he gives speeches in schools.

"I get asked some of the weirdest questions," he said. " 'Are you the dude that's ice skating in Alaska?' But it's good that people know I'm doing something different. That's the message that I get across: Don't be afraid to be different."

Green, of course, did not have a choice when he was confronted by his biggest difference. The shooting altered his life. He had been a varsity quarterback as a freshman at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. He was the starting point guard on the basketball team. He had just taken up track and field and he loved tennis.

In the hospital after he was shot, his four brothers and sisters and his mother were intent on treating him the same as they always had. And he came out fighting. After the United States surgeon general, Dr. Jocelyn Elders, heard his story, she asked him to testify before Congress in support of gun control.

At 16, Green faced a Congressional panel, described his injuries and said his medical care had cost taxpayers more than $1 million. "How many million-dollar bullets will it take before someone wakes up?" he said.

Green is still speaking out, but his topics have changed. He said he believed in the transformative power of sports, particularly for the disabled. But he also said he believed in skiing as a way to give young people a release from the challenges of the streets.

His enthusiasm is infectious. The United States team had him arrive here early, to appear on the "Today" show and to spread his views widely.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Green is a lack of any hint of bitterness. He said he hoped the person who shot him — also a teenager at the time — had turned himself around. He said he was angry at first but learned to get past those feelings.

Mostly, he is thankful for his new life, which allows him to travel the world and turn heads wherever he goes. His teammates and coaches joke that he makes friends before he even leaves an airport.

"I would have been in a totally different reality had I not been shot," Green said. "Through the years, you get an idea that there are six billion souls on the earth and everybody can't be perfect.

"I'm just happy I'm still alive."

[BullNBear52]

Thousands of Swedes greet Olympic hockey champions in Stockholm
By ADAM EWING, Associated Press Writer


STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Thousands of flag-waving fans welcomed Sweden's Olympic hockey champions with roaring cheers Monday as the players returned home for a hastily arranged gold-medal celebration.

Smiling broadly under gold-colored helmets, Peter Forsberg, Mats Sundin and the other Swedish players sang the national anthem along with the elated crowd packing a downtown square in Stockholm.

"We came to the tournament with pretty high expectations. We really wanted to win," goalie Henrik Lundqvist told the fans before breaking into an impromptu dance.

Sweden beat Finland 3-2 on Sunday to win its first Olympic hockey title since 1994.

The team's NHL players were originally scheduled to fly directly from Turin to the United States. But no one wanted to miss the celebrations in the Swedish capital.

"It's a lot of fun to come home to Sweden," Forsberg said at Stockholm's Arlanda airport. "It might be a pretty long night."

Forsberg said he would return to Philadelphia on Tuesday and hoped to play for the Flyers against the New Jersey Devils on Wednesday.

The players met fans and family at the airport before boarding a bus taking them to the celebrations in the city center.

"I'm so proud," said Lundqvist's father, Peter. "I didn't think I'd get to see him before he went back to America. It was great to be able to give him a hug."

The gold medal was the top story in the country's biggest newspapers Monday. Tabloids printed special sections that devoted dozens of pages to the win.

The Finns appeared to have recovered from the loss quickly, with thousands of hockey fans braving freezing temperatures to celebrate the nation's silver medal in Helsinki late Sunday.

A six-hour ceremony, with local singers performing on outdoor stages, ended in the homecoming of the Finnish "Lions." Fans greeted the team with shouts and flag-waving at the icy waterfront square near the president's palace.

Associated Press Writer Matti Huuhtanen in Helsinki, Finland, contributed to this report.

Updated on Monday, Feb 27, 2006 6:54 pm EST

[BullNBear52]

Turin bids circus-like farewell to Olympics; Vancouver takes the reins
By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer


TURIN, Italy (AP) -- Arrivederci, eh?


Turin bid farewell to its Olympics and handed over custody of the Winter Games to Vancouver in a spectacular, circus-like closing ceremony Sunday night, with a legion of clowns, acrobats and daredevils echoing both the misadventures and magnificence of the past two weeks.

The Olympic flame was barely extinguished when fireworks and confetti -- an Italian invention -- filled the air. Any wistfulness was swiftly submerged in the din, some of it provided by Latin pop sensation Ricky Martin; athletes joined the cast in dancing on the stage.

The theme of the evening was Carnevale, the annual festival being celebrated across Italy over the weekend. Some athletes wore red clown noses as they marched across the huge stage of Olympic Stadium, and many of the 35,000 spectators donned devil and angel masks.

Italy had an extra reason to celebrate -- a new national hero headlining the first-ever medal ceremony included in a Winter Games' closing festivities. Italy's Giorgio di Centa took gold in the 50km cross country skiing race on the final day of the games.

The crowd exploded in cheers and waved a sea of tiny Italian flags as di Centa and his fellow medalists strode to the podium. Helping bestow the medals was di Centa's sister, Manuela, an International Olympic Committee member and former cross country medalist herself.

Before declaring the games closed, IOC president Jacques Rogge described the Turin Olympics as "truly magnificent."

"You have succeeded brilliantly in meeting your challenge," he told organizers. "Grazie, Torino."

"We've done it," exulted Valentino Castellani, the organizing committee chief.

While Castellani spoke, an intruder who had obtained a staff ski-jacket approached the microphone and shouted, "Passion lives in Torino" before being whisked away by security officers. He was taken into custody for questioning.

The spotlight then shifted to Vancouver, host of the 2010 Games, with the raising of Canada's Maple Leaf flag and a resounding rendition of "O, Canada" by British Columbia-born opera star Ben Heppner. An Olympic flag was handed by Turin Mayor Sergio Chiamparino to Rogge and then to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan.

A quadriplegic since breaking his neck skiing at 19, Sullivan was unable to grasp the flag pole and wave it himself. Instead, Rogge placed the flag in a special cylinder on Sullivan's motorized wheelchair, and the elated mayor spun around several times to make the flag flutter, to the crowd's delight.

The lighthearted, often-lyrical pageantry opened with a white-and-black-clad clown on horseback entering from beneath the giant Olympic rings at one end of the stadium.

A dazzling array of circus acts, parades and carnival shenanigans followed -- clowns on swings and swiveling in large hoops, ballerinas and tumblers, acrobats dangling high above the stage from ribbons and rings, a person on stilts jumping rope, dancers dressed as Tarot cards. One convoy of clowns was equipped with vintage Italian motor scooters and pint-sized Fiat 500s, one of the smallest cars ever mass-produced.


(AP)

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Throughout, bits of burlesque unfolded in the stadium's entryways and aisles as a vagabond flower seller -- a traditional carnival figure -- was chased by a squad of Swiss guards. Watching it all was the so-called carnival court, a buffoonish royal entourage seated in a center stage box intended to gently mock the VIP seating of various Olympic dignitaries.

Among the real-life VIPs attending were Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who waited until the final day to make his first visit to the games, and a U.S. delegation including former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and car-racing great Mario Andretti. Berlusconi was greeted with a mix of cheers and jeers when he was introduced.

The athletes entered to the backdrop of "Volare," "That's Amore," and other classics. Among the flag-bearers were several gold medal winners, including U.S. speedskater Joey Cheek, Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko and Canadian speedskater Cindy Klassen, who won a games-high five medals.

Once seated in the stadium's lower deck, the athletes had a prime view of perhaps the ceremony's most magical moment.

Out of a ring in the center of the stage, a hidden, vertical wind tunnel was positioned to send up a blast of air powerful enough to lift winged, white-clad performers high in midair to hover like slow-gliding birds. One after another, to ethereal music, these flying humans rose gracefully and floated in the spotlight, then descended -- one of them, incredibly, on a snowboard; another on skis.

Soon afterward, the Olympic flag, aloft since the start of the games, was lowered and carried out slowly by eight Italian sports greats, including boxer Nino Benvenuti and skier Gustavo Thoeni. A children's choir sang Verdi's beautiful chorus "Va, pensiero" from the opera "Nabucco."

Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli followed, and roughly 400 lamp-carrying women in white gowns drifted across the stage. Their lamps slowly extinguished and then, suddenly, the huge Olympic flame high above the stadium went out as well.

Updated on Monday, Feb 27, 2006 12:11 am EST

[BullNBear52]

Thanks. You did a great job with all the pictures you posted as well. I guess we need to go skiing and ice skating while we wait for the next Olympics.

[BOREALIS]

CLOSING CEREMONY - MISC. IMAGES


Fans, athletes, coaches and organizers at the closing of the Winter Games in Italy.

[BOREALIS]

F I N A L MEDAL COUNT

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympics/2006/medals/tracker/

 
 COUNTRY          Total Medals    Gold  Silver  Bronze  
  Germany           29             11     12      6  
  United States     25              9      9      7  
  Canada            24              7     10      7  
  Austria           23              9      7      7  
  Russia            22              8      6      8  
  Norway            19              2      8      9  
  Sweden            14              7      2      5  
  Switzerland       14              5      4      5  
  South Korea       11              6      3      2  
  Italy             11              5      0      6  
  China             11              2      4      5  
  France             9              3      2      4  
  Netherlands        9              3      2      4  
  Finland            9              0      6      3  
  Czech Republic     4              1      2      1  
  Estonia            3              3      0      0  
  Croatia            3              1      2      0  
  Australia          2              1      0      1  
  Poland             2              0      1      1  
  Ukraine            2              0      0      2  
  Japan              1              1      0      0  
  Belarus            1              0      1      0  
  Bulgaria           1              0      1      0  
  Great Britain      1              0      1      0  
  Slovakia           1              0      1      0  
  Latvia             1              0      0      1  
 

MEDAL TRACKER for Top Three Leaders

DEU
G-11 S-12 B-6 Total = 29

USA
G-9 S-9 B-7 . .Total = 25

CAN
G-7 S-10 B-7. Total = 24

[BOREALIS]

Interesting excerpt from Dan Wetzel's column on YahooSports

"So here are my final 20 thoughts as my own personal Euro Trip mercifully ends without major international incident."

3. There is a Chinese speedskater by the name of Fengtong Yu.
Fengtong, I suppose, being a little bit of a long name, perhaps just to pick up chicks
or just because it works for T-Mac and A-Rod, Fengtong goes by F Yu.

This means nothing in Chinese. In English, it is the funniest thing ever
(to seventh graders and Abbott and Costello fans).
Imagine the hijinks of a phone call.

"May I ask who is calling?"

"F Yu."

"I beg your pardon?"

"F Yu"

"Well, if you are going to be rude, F Yu too."

"No, that is my son."

...

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/torino2006/news?slug=dw-wrap022606&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

[BOREALIS]

BNB, thanks for all your posting during the course of the Olympics

[BOREALIS]

Lots of interesting reading in those last few post-olympic messages.

[BullNBear52]

Italians End Up Treating the Games Like Their Own
By LYNN ZINSER
TURIN, Italy, Feb. 26 — In the end, the weather turned sparkling again — just as it had been for the opening ceremony — and Turin bade goodbye Sunday to an Olympics that finally seemed popular at home even as it got mixed reviews from its visitors from around the world.

The International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, struck an upbeat note in his final news conference and called the Games "truly magnificent" in his address at the closing ceremony. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, attended the two-hour gala at the Olympic stadium after he had skipped the opening ceremony, which seemed to reflect Italy's less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward its Games.

The energy picked up in the city as the Games wore on. Organizers said more than 900,000 tickets were sold, which was 90 percent of capacity. The medals plaza in Piazza Castello became a festive gathering spot and revelers filled the arcaded streets of downtown Turin.

"We are very proud," said Valentino Castellani, president of the Turin organizing committee. "This exceeded all of our expectations."

But while Turin did not come in with the weight of high expectations, much of the rest of the world looks at the Games differently. In particular, NBC counts on Olympic ratings and instead watched its broadcasts routinely get clobbered by shows like "American Idol." The United States team captured 25 medals, its second-highest total ever in the Winter Games and good for No. 2 in the medal count behind Germany, but the flameout of some of its highest profile athletes like the skier Bode Miller and the men's hockey team contributed to a dearth of heartwarming American story lines.

One of the few was the speedskater Joey Cheek, who won a gold and silver medal and donated his United States Olympic Committee bonus — a total of $40,000 — to the organization Right to Play, which promotes sports in third-world countries.

Cheek was the American flag bearer for the closing ceremony, which was a post-Olympic version of Carnevale, a festival of acrobats and clowns. Many of the athletes marched in wearing red clown noses. The spectacle featured a performance by the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and ended with a ceremonial handoff to the next winter Olympic city, Vancouver, British Columbia. The United States delegation included Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and the race car driver Mario Andretti.

Even though earlier in the week Rogge was among those criticizing the uneven attendance and lack of atmosphere, he delivered on his promise of a positive assessment of the Games — he does not, as the former president Juan Antonio Samaranch did, proclaim any Games the "best ever."

At Sunday's news conference, Rogge said: "The I.O.C. is happy with the Games. We have the best-ever quality of sports infrastructure. Security worked very well. The athletes are happy."

But the Games were marred by a high-profile police raid of houses rented by Austrian cross-country skiers and biathletes. Their drug tests were negative, but the Italian police are still running tests on syringes and other medical products they seized from the houses. Rogge said the investigation could take a couple of weeks.

"I think we have to fight doping with every means that we have," he said. "Analytical findings are one thing. Urine and blood tests are one thing. We have other means to prove guilt."

The Games featured only one positive drug test, despite a 71 percent jump in the number of drug tests taken here over the number done at Salt Lake City in 2002. The biathlete Olga Pyleva of Russia was stripped of her silver medal when her test came up positive for a banned stimulant.

"I am not disappointed," Rogge said. "Today I have only one case to report. Of course, I do not know what will come out of the Austrian case. I believe frankly that this is already a good result from our actions."

Initially, organizers were also worried about transportation to the far-flung mountain sites — many of which are connected by one two-lane road full of hairpin turns — but aside from a few glitches in the system, transportation was not a major issue. The weather eventually turned wintry in the mountains after months of little snow.

Although protests disrupted the torch relay before the Games, security was not tested until the closing ceremony. A man managed to get on the stage during a speech by Castellani. The man shouted, "Passion lives in Torino," before being taken into custody by security officers.

"It is extremely difficult to organize a Winter Olympics," said Jean-Claude Killy, the former Olympic skiing champion and head of the I.O.C. coordination commission that oversaw Turin's preparations. "It is the role of the International Olympic Committee to keep the athletes satisfied, and they are happy. They are very pleased."

But a few did complain about the lack of atmosphere at some events. The Alpine skiing races did not attract the raucous crowd they normally do, even when the stands were full. The atmosphere at speedskating drooped during the sprint events, the least popular races among the Dutch fans, who otherwise packed the oval and filled it with energy.

The Dutch stood and cheered for every skater, regardless of nationality, and generally celebrated nonstop, with their "Little Beer" band keeping the atmosphere in full-party mode while the Zamboni swept the ice.

The Italians could celebrate gold medals in luge (by Armin Zoeggeler, the closing ceremony flag bearer), cross-country skiing and speedskating, with Enrico Fabris becoming an overnight national hero with two golds and a bronze.

After Fabris's last race, Berlusconi told him, "Enrico, you are part of Italian sports history now."

On Sunday, Turin's Games passed into history with the Italians embracing them after all.

[BullNBear52]

Where a Sled, Not a Ferrari, Is the Ultimate Luxury Vehicle
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
CESANA PARIOL, Italy, Feb. 26 — It was shortly before midnight on Saturday. The stands were empty. The Olympic luge, skeleton and bobsled competitions were over, and two young Turin Organizing Committee volunteers were already finding an alternative use for the Olympic track: climbing the railing that separates the snow and dirt from the refrigerated sliding surface and posing for photographs while lying in one of the huge banked turns.

The track was built at an official cost of about $83 million on what was once a pristine, lightly wooded slope that has long been appreciated by inhabitants of the nearby villages for its tranquillity and the beauty of its panoramic view of Mount Chaberton and its neighboring peaks to the south.

But though the Alpine vista is still there, the slope is pristine no longer. Instead, there is a 4,708-foot track made of concrete, steel and local wood. Instead, there are new roads, the odd unfinished building and massive artificial embankments that looked fine Saturday covered in snow but did not look nearly as inconspicuous earlier in the Games when no snow covered the mud.

As the five-ringed circus rumbles out of town, the bobsled driver Andre Lange of Germany has his two Olympic gold medals, and the inhabitants of the new track's neighboring villages have their concerns.

"I hope it's not going to be a white elephant, but I'm worried," said Massimo Rigat, an architect whose family operates a sporting goods store a short walk uphill from the track in San Sicario.

I met the Rigat family before the Athens Games in 2004 and returned to see them in 2005. On both occasions they expressed concerns about the post-Olympic use of the track in a region that has no historic affinity for the sliding sports, unlike the German-speaking sections of northeastern Italy that have produced Olympic luge champions like Armin Zoeggeler, who has won the last two men's titles.

But now the Susa Valley and its inhabitants have the latest world-class facility, one that will cost an estimated $594,000 annually to operate. Its short-term future seems secure, because a foundation created by the province of Turin and the Piedmont region will finance the track for several years as part of the post-Games transition. But the longer term is a trickier matter.

Robert Storey, the Canadian who is president of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, has heard such doomsaying before; his tone alternated between indulgent and irritated on Saturday in a tent at the track set up for the Olympic family.

"If you look back over the recent history of bobsleigh tracks and their after use, I think you find that when you compare it to most other facilities, they are the one thing that does last and have some interesting uses afterward," he said. "If you have a commercially minded operation, you can run a bobsleigh track at an operating profit or break even."

Storey points out that the last five Winter Olympic tracks are still functioning. Even the much-derided track in La Plagne, France, built for the 1992 Games in Albertville, has remained open with the help of occasional government subsidies. "It makes money to the point that they don't like holding competitive events, because in the winter they are taking people down," Storey said, referring to tourists.

But the challenge here is greater. The Savoy region in France has a much denser tourism infrastructure, and the track is in the middle of a high-traffic resort area. The track in La Plagne is also the only top-level track in France, just as the Lillehammer track, built for the 1994 Games, is the only one in Norway, and the Nagano track, built for the 1998 Games, is the only one in Japan.

Italy already has a track in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the site of the 1956 Winter Olympics and a regular stop on the World Cup circuit.

"If Cortina's hasn't been a smashing success, with all its tradition and infrastructure, do you really think ours is going to be a success?" said Rigat, the architect. "We have no culture of bob and luge here."

Giuseppe Gattino, a spokesman for the Turin Games, said the Italian national bobsled, luge and skeleton teams are now expected to use Cesana for training. As in La Plagne, the track will also be open to tourists. Storey said there was a tentative plan for a World Cup bobsled event here next season.

"Villagers generally aren't very well educated as to what the Olympics mean and so fear change, and why wouldn't they?" Storey said. "I think you'll find more now who accept and embrace it. I think the concern here is not about the track being here. It's about whether or not the track is going to divert or drain resources from the community. If the track can be demonstrated to be an enhancement, even from a public relations standpoint or a promotion standpoint, I think you'll find a different tune.

"I've talked to villagers here, too, including some of the village leaders, and many of them are viewing this track as an opportunity."

But some, like Rigat, remain pessimistic, even though they have enjoyed these Olympic Games. "I don't like the fact that every four years, they have to destroy a piece of land for the Olympics in order to hold these sliding sports," Rigat said.

[BullNBear52]

The Last Word (and Gold) to Italy

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 27, 2006
PRAGELATO, Italy, Feb. 26 (AP) — The colors of Italy's flag streaked across the sky. The horde of Italian fans lingered, savoring one last moment of Olympic triumph.

In the middle of it all was Giorgio di Centa, who won the last possible gold medal for the host country Sunday in the Winter Games' final cross-country ski race. Di Centa beamed as he worked his way through the celebration, surrounded by eight police officers in an escort fit for a president.

Di Centa used a powerful sprint through the final stretch of the 50-kilometer skate for Italy's first individual gold in cross-country skiing in 38 years. After his victory, sporting the Italian flag around his neck, di Centa was asked to describe his race.

"Kilometer by kilometer?" he said with a grin.

The 33-year-old di Centa finished in 2 hours 6 minutes 11.8 seconds, only eight-tenths of a second ahead of the silver medalist, Yevgeni Dementiev of Russia — a wild ending to the longest and most grueling cross-country competition.

Moments later, a handful of parachutists, trailing streaks of smoke in red, white and green — the colors of the Italian flag — dropped from the sunny sky in a vibrant tribute to Italy's final gold.

"I usually finish second in World Cup races, but today I performed really well and I achieved a fantastic victory, especially because we are Italy," said di Centa, a father of three daughters.

It was a second gold medal for di Centa, also a member of Italy's winning foursome in the 4x10-kilometer relay Feb. 19. Mikhail Botwinov of Austria won the bronze medal.

Carl Swenson, an American, did not finish. He started despite being slowed by a head cold. He trained Saturday and decided to race on Sunday in his third and final Olympics. Andrew Johnson was the top American, finishing 34th.

[BullNBear52]

A Taste of the Olympics, Easy as Picking Up a Broom
By KATIE ZEZIMA
WAYLAND, Mass., Feb. 25 — For the last two weeks, Matt Durso's life has revolved around curling, an Olympic sport that he had never played and, to be honest, did not fully understand.

To better grasp the game, Mr. Durso, 22, a student at Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vt., and two friends woke up early Saturday morning and drove three and a half hours to Broomstones, a curling club in this town 18 miles west of Boston, to attend a learn-to-curl open house. "I've been watching every match every day," Mr. Durso said. "I've been obsessed."

And so, it seems, have millions of other people around the country who are becoming entranced by a sport many liken to shuffleboard on ice.

The United States Curling Association's Web site crashed on Feb. 16, when it received 12.5 million hits. The association said dozens of clubs around the country held open houses this month, capitalizing on the Olympic coverage, and many drew record turnouts.

Pete McCuen, the president of the Ardsley Curling Club in Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y., said traffic on the club's Web site had tripled in recent weeks and the club was busy booking corporate events and parties. In Los Angeles, more than 120 people have signed up in the past week to an Internet mailing list about starting a curling club.

Here at Broomstones, more than 1,000 aspiring curlers showed up for the five-hour open house, some waiting outside upwards of an hour in snow and temperatures in the 20's. "There's a lot of buzz out there," said Dan Williams, the club's president.

Much of that stems from increased broadcast time thanks to the sport's popularity in the 2002 Salt Lake City games. This year, NBC broadcast 26 Olympic curling matches. Through Thursday, 37 million viewers had watched curling, the network said. That number does not include the men's gold-medal match or the bronze-medal match, which the United States team won.

"People get hooked when they watch," said Bev Schrader, a spokeswoman for the United States Curling Association. "I think they're realizing the challenge, the finesse, and a lot of people are intrigued by the strategy."

The sport originated in Scotland and is extremely popular in Scandinavia, where the Swedish women's team was in a rock video, and in Canada, where "curling clubs are like bowling alleys," said Chuck Sharkas, a member of the board of directors of the Kettle Moraine Curling Club in Hartland, Wisc.

The aim of the game is to slide a 42-pound piece of granite, known as a stone or a rock, closest to the center of a bull's eye. The strategy comes in landing the stone nearest the center or in a position where it can block the stone of an opponent.

A player twists the handle of the stone to aim it. After the stone is cast on the ice, which is textured, two players preceed it and sweep the ice in front of it to control the angle at which its path bends, or curls, hence the name.

"It's kind of like chess, but with exercise," said Stephen Szczesniak, 30, a systems analyst from Marlborough, Mass., who attended the Broomstones open house.

Casting a stone is not easy, nor is running on ice while squatting and sweeping. But the sport can be played by people of all ages who dream about a shot at Olympic glory.

"I think at its core the reason why I really, really enjoy watching curling is I think it's the only chance I have at ever winning an Olympic medal in my life," said Ethan A. Brosowsky, an actor and producer who is part of the Los Angeles group. "You look at downhill skiing or bobsledding and say, 'I can never do that, not in a million years.' But with curling it's different."

Mr. Brosowsky, 24, watched the sport during the 2002 Olympics but really got into it this year, recording every match and staying up until 2 a.m. watching them. He and others worry that the cost of starting a curling club would be prohibitive. The clubs are like country clubs, with members paying several hundred dollars to join for the season, which runs from about October to March. A set of stones can start at $8,000.

But none of that appears to deter the fanatics. "I'm broke and I would absolutely do it," Mr. Brosowsky said. "I would spend my last dollar."

Avid curlers said one of the biggest draws of the sport was its social aspect. Tradition says that the winning team buys the losing team a round of drinks, and everyone sits around the bar and rehashes the match.

"There's a lot of civility in the game," said Dan Johnson, communications officer of the Dallas-Fort Worth curling club. "There's handshaking before and after. You call your own fouls. There's no referee. You're expected to abide by the traditions of the game."

"It just kind of hooks you," he said.

The folks at Broomstones, at the open house, were trying to reel people in. Aspiring curlers were taken onto the ice in large groups every 15 minutes, and each person got a chance to throw a stone. Mr. Durso volunteered to go first. He put his foot in a starting block, raised his hips and let the stone go, then turned around, raised his hands in the air and stepped off the ice.

"This is so cool," said Mr. Durso, who signed up for a learn-to-curl session next month. "Plus it's a very obscure thing to say you do."

[BullNBear52]

Lundqvist's Painful Move Saves Sweden
By LEE JENKINS
TURIN, Italy, Feb. 26 — As Henrik Lundqvist dropped into a split, a hockey goalie turned ice dancer, an arena winced and a country cringed.

Sweden led Finland by one goal. The clock at Palasport Olimpico showed 25 seconds. The puck trickled ominously into the crease. Lundqvist, the Swedish goalie who plays for the Rangers when he is not at the Olympics, had little choice but to assume his most painful position.

Shielded from the action, Lundqvist said he did not see Finland's Olli Jokinen kick the puck with his skate, control it with his stick and fling it toward the net. Stretched across the goal line, Lundqvist missed the puck with his right leg. He missed it with his right arm. Only a couple splinters of his stick secured Sweden's 3-2 victory over Finland in Sunday's gold medal game, the final event of the Olympics.

"It was," Lundqvist said, "one of the most important saves of my career."

As the Swedish forward Fredrik Modin said: "It was the gold. Right there."

The last time Sweden captured a gold medal in hockey, at the Lillehammer Games in 1994, the Swedish Postal Services created a stamp to commemorate Peter Forsberg's winning goal. Should a new stamp be issued, it will have to show Lundqvist with his legs splayed. It will have to show Jokinen, starting to raise his arms. And it will have to show the puck finally dribbling away.

"Close," Jokinen said.

"Sick," Forsberg said.

"Luck," Lundqvist said.

When the 25 seconds had ticked to zero, Lundqvist was Sweden's newest legend and the Rangers' newest icon, all at once. He took off his mask, emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty, and tossed it triumphantly in the air. He untucked his jersey, colored Sweden's blue and gold, and revealed his red Rangers' goalie pants underneath his pads.

Lundqvist will return to New York this week, forever changed from when he left. He is no longer the Rangers' rookie goalie who went to training camp vying for a backup job. He is one of the most celebrated hockey players in the world. As Lundqvist looked down at his gold medal, he said, "On my flight back to New York, I will be staring at this."

The viewing public will still be deconstructing replays of his inconceivable flurry of saves. Lundqvist acknowledged that he had an inconsistent Olympic tournament, but in the final minutes of the final game, he blocked a shot by Kimmo Timonen with his chest. He deflected a shot by Niklas Hagman with his shoulder. He turned away a shot by Jere Lehtinen with his stick. He left Teemu Selanne in tears.

"Some guys are smiling all the way," Selanne said. "And some are not."

At the medal ceremony, the Swedish side of the ice was littered with helmets and gloves and sticks, the remnants of a raging victory party. The Finnish side was laid completely bare. Swedish players kissed their gold medals. Finnish players did not even acknowledge whatever silver accessory was hanging from their necks.

Losing a game of this magnitude was difficult enough. But losing it to the Swedes was especially excruciating. These two Nordic countries, which share 380 miles of borders, have long been oceans apart in the hockey standings. Sweden has beaten Finland 40 times in Olympic and World Championship competition. Finland has beaten Sweden 15 times.

So cocky were the Swedes that one tabloid newspaper ran a story Sunday encouraging Finnish residents to immigrate to Sweden if they wanted to be part of a gold medal celebration. The story was headlined "Tomorrow is too late," and it included a link on the Web site to official immigration documents. The link was particularly insulting, considering that Sweden had ruled Finland for 650 years.

Once again, big brother beat little brother, the bully ruled the playground, the prom king got the girl. Ten seconds into the third period, with the score tied at 2-2 and the teams playing four-on-four, Mats Sundin left a pass for Forsberg, who left a pass for defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom. Those three players, more than any others, have made Sweden a hockey superpower. And those three players, together one last time, would team up for their crowning moment.

In a single furious motion, Lidstrom took the pass, took the shot and scored the winning goal, a high hard one that struck Finland square in the chin. "I hit it perfect," Lidstrom said. "I had everything on that shot. It went right where I aimed. It could be the biggest goal I ever scored."

As four Swedes embraced on the ice, one Swede started jumping up and down in the penalty box. Tomas Holmstrom, the Swedish forward who also plays alongside Lidstrom for the Detroit Red Wings, worried that his penalty would hurt his team. But Lidstrom, a defenseman to his core, continued to erase mistakes.

"He always comes through," Holmstrom said. "I'm glad he's on my side."

Soon enough, the Swedes will have to go without Lidstrom, Forsberg and Sundin, their aging leaders. The country will turn instead to Lundqvist, a 23-year-old who also plays bass guitar in a rock band. The flag was officially passed to Lundqvist late Sunday afternoon, and he wore it around his shoulders, matching his gold medal.

Now it is back to New York, to a team that leads the Atlantic Division and is starting to talk about the unthinkable. Lundqvist tried Sunday to compare the gold medal he has already won with the Stanley Cup he has not yet won.

He refused to say the gold medal meant more. He refused to settle for a split.

[BullNBear52]

Reasons to be proudBy Nikki Stone, Yahoo! Sports | February 26, 2006


TURIN, Italy – I went into Turin Games with the uneasy feeling that America's "heroes" were certain athletes who were a little too free in expressing their less-than-exemplary behaviors. But as the games come to a close, the United States boasts some genuine heroes that anyone can (and should) be proud of.

I do not share the majority's opinion that it was generally an unsuccessful games for Team USA. It finished with 25 medals, 12 more than it had ever recorded at a Winter Olympics on foreign soil.

The U.S. might not have reached all the medals it had hoped for, but most of the athletes who walked away with the hardware are quality people that the country can be proud of.

Take, for example, an exuberant redhead who shattered the impression that snowboarders just don't care about the Olympics. Or a Park City skier who came out of nowhere to show us that dreams do come true. Or a philanthropic Harvard hopeful who gave up $40,000 of his winnings to help children around the world.

The U.S. snowboard team once said that the Olympics really didn't matter and many members felt that the games actually took away from their sport. But seeing the tears well up in Shaun White's eyes, you knew that this experience was easily the highlight of his career. His obvious enthusiasm bubbled right out of the television and into living rooms across America. He wasn't afraid to express how much it meant to have that ring of gold hanging around his neck.

American Alpine skier Ted Ligety entered the Olympics in the shadow of Bode Miller. Even if the press and the coaches didn't necessarily believe in Ligety, it didn't matter. Because he believed in himself. The look of complete awe on Ligety's face as he looked up at the scoreboard said it all. Gold medals do happen for small-town guys who have a boatload of passion.

Joey Cheek proved that speedskating Olympians can do something more than just stroll down the red carpet with their 15 minutes of fame. He decided to make a difference in the lives of refugee children from Sudan, donating all the bonus money he received from the U.S. Olympic Committee for his gold and silver medals to a humanitarian organization called Right to Play.

His incredible donation will contribute to sport and play programs that work as psychological and social tools for development in one of the world's most disadvantaged countries.

These three athletes represent all that is good with the U.S. team. With role models like these, how can we say the games were a loss?

But still, I can hear the complaints all the way across the ocean: "Why didn't Bode Miller or Daron Rahlves win all the Alpine events? Why didn't Chad Hedrick match Eric Heiden's record of five gold medals? Why didn't Sasha Cohen stay up during her free skate? Why didn't Apolo Anton Ohno win more than one gold?"

They didn't because determined Frenchman and Austrians had the same goals as Bode and Rahlves. And because Hedrick's ambition was an extreme stretch. And because mistakes do happen when there is such intense pressure – even for a consistent, young girl like Cohen. And because Ohno's competition was training just as hard as he was.

But that's what the Olympics are about. Who wants to go to a games if there is no one to stand toe-to-toe at the line or push competitors to train even harder?

Throughout the games, I heard several past medalists get the common "You want to make a comeback? These athletes need saving."

My response was always, "No, they don't need saving, they need support."

It frustrates me to no end when I hear people putting down the Olympic athletes for their poor performances. Most of these people have no idea what it feels like to have the weight of their country resting on their shoulders. They have no idea what it feels like to have TV cameras inches from their face. They have no idea what it feels like knowing that if something goes wrong, you have to wait another four years to try again.

And they have no idea what it feels like to have their whole future resting on just a few seconds.

It's more pressure than most people will feel in a lifetime. I'm glad that I will never have to feel pressure like that again. It was that pressure that would keep me up endless nights and occupy my every waking thought. For this reason, I am always more sympathetic to a botched Olympic performance than most people are.

I won't pretend that I'm not saddened by some of the results – aerials in particular. It's hard to see fellow athletes hang their heads in disappointment after their lifelong dreams have just come to an end. I know how hard they worked and the pain they went through to get there. I know the sacrifices they made to even stand at the starting line. I know how badly they wanted this.

But medal or no medal, athletes are not defined by titles and accomplishments. We are defined by our character and the company we keep. I would much rather someone call me a good person than an Olympic gold medalist.

And this is probably the biggest reason that I would call the Turin Games a success for the U.S. Despite a few exceptions, these athletes are really incredible people.

Yahoo! Sports' freestyle skiing analyst Nikki Stone won a gold medal in aerials at the 1998 Olympic Winter Games.

[BullNBear52]

When police officers raided the Austrian biathlon and cross country houses, they found 100 syringes and evidence of blood doping. In a less publicized incident, a police raid of Bode Miller's trailer home turned up three empty bottles of Jack Daniel's and five frozen burrito wrappers.

[BullNBear52]

Parting shotsBy Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports | February 26, 2006


TURIN, Italy – Eighteen days, 28 columns and an incalculable number of interviews, competitions and bad cups of coffee later, I finally get to go home. Nothing against the Olympics, but I have a wife and a daughter (about to turn 1) that are far more appealing right now.

Anyway, after all of that, you would think I, your faithful correspondent, would have nothing left to say. But only if you haven't been paying attention. So here are my final 20 thoughts as my own personal Euro Trip mercifully ends without major international incident.

1. When police officers raided the Austrian biathlon and cross country houses, they found 100 syringes and evidence of blood doping. In a less publicized incident, a police raid of Bode Miller's trailer home turned up three empty bottles of Jack Daniel's and five frozen burrito wrappers.

Bode jokes are so easy. What can you say about this guy, who will go down as one of the greatest over-hyped flops of all time? He made his money and got famous (which he now supposedly regrets), so I guess he'll always have that. But he'll be remembered in "Dan and Dave" infamy when it comes to the Olympics. And no matter how "content" he says he is, at some point, when (if) he matures, he'll regret this entire thing.

He isn't the first guy to waste a lot of God-given talent, sacrifice by others and good fortune, but it is still a sight to behold to watch someone who could have been great show up that out of shape, that disinterested and that determined to party.

Then again, there is that picture floating around the Internet of him at a bar with a Playboy playmate – supposedly it was taken during the games, although who knows. So, he may not have gotten gold, but he may have gotten the blonde. "I got to party at the Olympic level," he told the Associated Press.

So there, I guess.

2. After the big Austrian drug bust in the mountains, the team's coach, Walter Mayer, promptly fled the country. He was MIA until a resident in rural Austria called police saying some strange guy was sleeping in his car on the side of the road. When the cops came, Mayer fled in the vehicle, crashed into a police barrier and was arrested for being drunk. Then he admitted himself into a mental hospital.

He's now a lock for Big 12 coach of the year.

3. There is a Chinese speedskater by the name of Fengtong Yu. Fengtong, I suppose, being a little bit of a long name, perhaps just to pick up chicks or just because it works for T-Mac and A-Rod, Fengtong goes by F Yu.

This means nothing in Chinese. In English, it is the funniest thing ever (to seventh graders and Abbott and Costello fans). Imagine the hijinks of a phone call.

"May I ask who is calling?"

"F Yu."

"I beg your pardon?"

"F Yu"

"Well, if you are going to be rude, F Yu too."

"No, that is my son."

4. What? Come on. That was at least as funny as half the comedies on ABC. At least.

5. Far be it for me to criticize these fine and dedicated athletes and, well, let's get the "not that there is anything wrong with that" out of the way early, but is the doubles luge really necessary? And if so, who, exactly, was the first man to convince another man that they should both don rubber suits and lay on top of each other in that particular position.

Did he have to buy him dinner and a movie first?

6. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon waiting for a colleague to finish writing than drinking tall glasses of Krombacher at the Pingini Bar in San Sicario overlooking the Alps.

7. Best I can tell, Gro Marit Istad-Kristiansen of Norway defeated Bjoergvin Bjoergvinsson of Iceland for the longest dang name at the Olympics. Both of those athletes deserve an extra 500 points if they can spell those suckers correct on the SAT.

Like Joey Cheek, they still wouldn't get into Harvard, but it couldn't hurt.

8. Speaking of Iceland, I was in a bar there once and met my personal favorite Icelander, the immortal Magnus Ver Magnusson of "World Strongest Man" fame.

Magnus was a monster and we talked for a few minutes. He was pretty interesting guy and not just because he used to lift Volkswagens and giant rocks. He offered to buy a round of drinks and asked if I would do a shot with him. Naturally, I thought it would be an honor.

Then he ordered two shots of peach schnapps. Yeah, peach schnapps. Perhaps the single most unlikely drink order I have ever personally experienced. Four-time World's Strongest Man drank peach schnapps.

9. It is always nice when traveling abroad to find out that the country you are in just got its first case of the bird flu. I'm beginning to regret my decision to play with those dead crows behind the media village.

10. TV in my room was all in Italian except for three (kind of four) networks. There was BBC World, which is the most depressing headline news imaginable, nothing but war, strife and bird flu. There was CNBC Europe, which is only a little better.

Then was Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) which does such a better job covering the Olympics than NBC it is embarrassing. I only wish every American household had the chance to watch CBC, where in a novel concept, it actually shows the games.

I know, I know. What a crazy idea.

Finally there was MTV Italia, which is in Italian except when a good Nelly video comes on and then I just wonder if there is anyone at the United Nations capable of translating that.

11. There was also EuroSport, which was in some European language but did have NBA highlights/news. The best was when the Knicks made a trade to make their starting backcourt consist of fellow underachieving ball hogs Steve Francis and Stephon Marbury. I couldn't understand what the anchor was saying as he made the announcement, but at the end he just started laughing.

Isiah Thomas, an embarrassment of a GM on two continents.

12. The most common complaint I heard about NBC's coverage of the games is that the network held tape-delayed broadcasts (often over-packaged, by the way) of events until the 10-11 p.m. hour when it could have been seen earlier. Why tune out a generation of school kids (let alone tired working adults) who could have seen the big events in the 8 p.m. hour?

Does anyone at the network have any clue how a typical American family operates? Anyone? Or did "American Idol" scare it that much?

NBC operates in a vacuum of pretentiousness that worked for decades because viewers had no alternative. Now they do, with serious counter-programming, the Internet and larger cable systems. So the network took a bath. In Beijing (2008), it will be even worse. Until Dick Ebersol adapts with the times, he doesn't deserve a fraction of the fawning press he gets.

13. Almaty, 2014. When I first heard that Almaty, Kazakhstan, was bidding to host the Winter Olympics in 2014, my first thought was to announce my retirement from sports writing effective 2013. (Hold the applause figure skating fans).

All I knew about Almaty was what this cheesy, low-budget press release (it was a one-page, folded flyer) told me, a chief reason Almaty should be chosen was because "Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world."

That's not exactly something that gets your heart pumping, you know.

Well, we mock what we don't understand. I went to the press conference. The Almaty people had a better press package – full color, bound, 150-page packet. They had a video. They had music. They had pictures of smiling residents of Almaty. They had a card for me from the mayor of Almaty. They had all sorts of nice Kazakhstanis answering questions.

Little did I know Kazakhstan has lots of money (from oil), a beautiful mountain range (from glaciers) and a lot of spirit (from no longer being communist). It is a "Eurasian Country, a Land of the Future."

The organizers have all sorts of good plans and nice stadiums. All the venues but one are within 15 kilometers of one another. It looks like a beautiful place. They said I could visit.

They also said they have 100 billion barrels of unexplored oil, so that should be enough to bribe IOC officials.

I just can't see any downside here. So I hereby throw the support of Yahoo! Sports behind the bid. I'll be there in 2014. Maybe.

14. Buying gifts for relatives is usually difficult, but not for my father-in-law, Ron Wilson. My flight home has a layover in Frankfurt, Germany, and I just know there is nothing that would brighten that guy's day like a package of Frankfurt frankfurters. You just have to know the man.

15. One of these years, Europeans are going to realize it is OK to drink coffee in servings larger than five ounces. It is pure comedy seeing a couple of tough cops sipping tiny cups.

16. Saturday night I went over to short track speedskating even though I wasn't going to write about it. Short track is an awesome sport to watch live. Especially the relays. There is no way this doesn't work on ESPN. None. Ditto for snowboardcross.

The highlight of the night – besides the fact that I somehow wound up drinking beer with someone from the World Anti-Doping Agency – was finally hearing the "Star-Spangled Banner" (for Apolo Anton Ohno). Almost three weeks here and I hadn't heard it.

17. Lots of people sent emails asking how I enjoyed Italy or whether the people of Turin had done a great job. I hadn't mentioned this stuff much because I really didn't think anyone would care. But, by request:

I think the Turin folks did do a nice job. There are always problems early at these things – the scope of an Olympics is overwhelming – but everything settled down. For the most part, things worked. My media village room was small – I actually think I had more room in the womb – but it was new and clean.

The people of Turin were a lot of fun. They have some passion about life, food and having a good time. I am not sure they were completely swept up in the games (and the restaurants downtown closed too early), but they did seem to enjoy most of it. As one taxi driver told me, this was his best month in business ever. And the guy who owns the restaurant near the media village may buy a castle in Tuscany. So that is good.

Turin is a working town, home to Fiat auto factories, so outside of some beautiful squares downtown (where the "Today Show" originated from) it isn't a picturesque place. But it served me fine.

18. That said, the Italians did have some issues. Nothing says "welcome, tourists" like crime, but it is what it is. There were so many pick pockets, laptop thieves and other sketchy characters around the media center you would have thought the UConn basketball team was in town. The Polizia didn't seem too concerned about any of it.

19. As for the wine? Better than advertised. Some of the pasta too. You couldn't go wrong if you found the time to get out to dinner. I had something called "spaghetti in a paper bag." I also had something called root beet gnocchi. It's all good.

20. The Shroud of Turin, which some believe is the wrap they buried Jesus in, is housed here. It wasn't on display during the games, it only comes out every 25 years and the flood of pilgrims to see it makes the Olympic crush look desolate. So while I couldn't see it in person, I did tour the Shroud of Turin museum, which was very interesting and highly recommended, especially since they allow you to draw your own conclusion.

Since I don't want to set off a religious war (I've learned from the Denmark media), I'll keep that opinion to myself.

For once.

Dan Wetzel is Yahoo! Sports' national columnist. Dan is the author of two new books.

[BOREALIS]

High-tech spectacle ends Turin Olympics
Carnevale-themed event includes passing flame to Vancouver for 2010


Fireworks light up the sky during the Closing Ceremony of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games

By DAVID CRARY
The Associated Press
Sunday, February 26, 2006; 5:26 PM

TURIN, Italy -- Turin's Olympics, a topsy-turvy mix of marvels and misadventures, ended appropriately with a closing-ceremony Carnevale _ a circus-like celebration full of clowns and acrobats, vibrant and often dreamlike.

Fireworks, confetti and pulsating ballads filled the air. At one point, a winged snowboarder hovered high above ground, as if by magic.

Some athletes wore red clown noses Sunday night as they swarmed across the huge stage of Olympic Stadium, waving jubilantly to a backdrop of bouncy Italian songs. Many of the 35,000 spectators donned devil and angel masks in a closing ceremony doubling as the annual Carnevale festival celebrated across Italy this weekend.

Italy had an extra reason to celebrate _ a brand-new national hero as headliner of the first-ever medal ceremony included in a Winter Games' closing festivities. After an Olympics that often lacked star power, Italy's Giorgio di Centa filled the void with a final-day victory in the 50-kilometer cross-country race.

The crowd erupted in cheers and waved a sea of tiny Italian flags as di Centa and his fellow medalists strode to the podium. Helping bestow the medals was di Centa's sister, Manuela, an International Olympic Committee member and former cross-country medalist herself.

Before declaring the games closed, IOC president Jacques Rogge described the Turin Olympics as "truly magnificent."

"You have succeeded brilliantly in meeting your challenge," he told organizers. "Grazie, Torino."

"We've done it," exulted Valentino Castellani, the organizing committee chief.

While Castellani spoke, an intruder approached the microphone and shouted, "Passion lives in Torino" before being whisked away by security officers. Police said the man was Spanish; he was taken into custody for questioning.

The spotlight then shifted to Vancouver, host of the 2010 Games, with the raising of Canada's Maple Leaf flag and a sonorous rendition of "O, Canada" by British Columbia-born opera star Ben Heppner. In a relay, an Olympic flag was handed by Turin Mayor Sergio Chiamparino to Rogge and then to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan.

A quadriplegic since breaking his neck skiing at 19, Sullivan was unable to grasp the flag pole himself. Instead, he had fitted his motorized wheelchair with a cylinder to hold the flag and spun around in it several times to make the flag flutter, to the crowd's delight.

The lighthearted, often lyrical pageantry opened with a white-and-black clad clown on horseback entering from beneath the giant Olympic rings at one end of the stadium.

A dizzying array of circus acts, parades and carnival shenanigans followed _ clowns on swings and swiveling in large hoops, ballerinas and tumblers, acrobats dangling high above the stage from ribbons and rings, a stilt walker jumping rope, dancers dressed as Tarot cards. One convoy of clowns was equipped with vintage Italian motor scooters and pint-sized Fiat 500s, one of the smallest cars ever mass-produced.

Throughout, bits of burlesque unfolded in the stadium's entryways and aisles as a vagabond flower seller _ a traditional carnival figure _ was chased by an ever-growing squad of Swiss guards. Watching it all was the so-called carnival court, a buffoonish royal entourage seated in a center stage box intended to gently mock the VIP seating of various Olympic dignitaries.

Among the real-life VIPs attending were Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who waited until the final day to make his first visit to the games, and a U.S. delegation including former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and car-racing great Mario Andretti. Berlusconi was greeted with a mix of cheers and jeers when he was introduced.

The intended stars of the evening _ the athletes _ entered to the backdrop of "Volare," "That's Amore," and other classics. Among the flag-bearers were several gold medal winners, including U.S. speedskater Joey Cheek, Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko and Canadian speedskater Cindy Klassen, who won a games-high five medals.

Once seated in the stadium's lower deck, the athletes had a prime view of perhaps the ceremony's most magical moment.

Out of a ring in the center of the stage, a hidden, vertical wind tunnel was positioned to send up a blast of air powerful enough to lift winged, white-clad performers high in midair to hover like slow-gliding birds. One after another, to ethereal music, these flying humans rose gracefully and floated in the spotlight, then descended _ one of them, incredibly, on a snowboard; another on skis.

Soon afterward, the Olympic flag, aloft since the start of the games, was lowered and carried out slowly by eight all-time Italian sports greats, including boxer Nino Benvenuti and skier Gustavo Thoeni. A children's choir sang Verdi's beautiful chorus "Va, Pensiero" from the opera "Nubuccho."

Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli followed, and roughly 400 lamp-carrying women in white gowns drifted across the stage. Their lamps slowly extinguished and then, suddenly, the huge Olympic flame high above the stadium went out as well.

Any wistfulness was quickly submerged in a din of fireworks and music, some performed by Latin pop sensation Ricky Martin. Athletes joined the cast in dancing on the stage.

[BOREALIS]

The Olympic flame burns during the Closing Ceremony of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games
on February 26, 2006 at the Olympic Stadium in Turin, Italy.
(Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

TURIN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 26:

[BOREALIS]

A general view of the Olympic Stadium during the Closing Ceremony
of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games on February 26, 2006 at the Olympic Stadium in Turin, Italy.
(Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images)




The Olympic flame burns during the Closing Ceremony

[teapeebubbles]

Bode Miller On 0 For 5 Olympic Bust:

“Man, I Rocked Here”...

“It's Been An Awesome Two Weeks”...

[BOREALIS]

Yea, but Bode did it "His Way"!

Maybe some day he'll get it!

In the meantime, he's giving the comedians, columnists and the public
plenty of "negative" material to work with.

[BOREALIS]

I was pulling the Swedish team too....
got a little Swede blood running thru my veins.

[BullNBear52]

Years ago I used to ski on the slopes. Now I pretty much stick to X-country when I get back home to MA. I'll go out for a walk in the woods but 31 miles is way beyond my limit.

[BullNBear52]

Considering that my wife works for Volvo we had to root for the home team. ;)

[teapeebubbles]

"This just in. Bode Miller has tested negative for gold medals." -- David Letterman

[BOREALIS]

Medals awarded for 50km Mass Start Cross Country

Eugeni Dementiev of Russia (Silver),
Giorgio di Centa (C Podium) of Italy (Gold) and
Mikhail Botwinov of Austria (Bronze)
celebrate receiving their medals for final 50km Mass Start Cross Country
during the Closing Ceremony of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games
on February 26, 2006 at the Olympic Stadium in Turin, Italy

[BOREALIS]

How Swede it is
Sweden celebrates their 3-2 win over Finland in the gold medal Ice Hockey final
of the 2006 Winter Olympics, 26 February 2006 at the Palasport Olimpico in Turin.


Gold, Swede gold
The Sweden bench erupts in celebration around Finland's Teemu Selanne (8) and Kimmo Timonen (4) after winning the gold medal ice hockey match 3-2 at in Turin, Italy.


Sweden celebrates their 3-2 win over Finland in the gold medal ice hockey match.

[BullNBear52]

Sweden Takes Hockey Gold
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:51 a.m. ET

TURIN, Italy (AP) -- Nicklas Lidstrom's blast from just inside the blue line nine seconds into the third period gave Sweden a 3-2 victory over Finland in the men's hockey gold medal game Sunday.

Each team had a player in the penalty box when Lidstrom took a back pass from Mats Sundin and fired from the point past Finnish goalie Antero Niittymaki.

The game, which is the Nordic equivalent of the Super Bowl on ice, was tied 2-2 after two periods following a flurry of goals midway through the second period.

Finland led 1-0 when Henrik Zetterberg and Niklas Kronwall scored power-play goals to give Sweden a 2-1 lead with 6:35 left in the second period. But Ville Peltonen then took a nice pass from Jussi Jokinen and flipped a backhander past Swedish goal Henrik Lundqvist to tie the score at 2.

Kimmo Timonen had scored on a blast from the point on a power play to give Finland its first goal. Timonen's shot dribbled through Lundqvist's pads and slowly rolled into the net.

The game is the final contest of the Turin Olympics, and to people in Sweden and Finland its a huge grudge match between the Nordic neighbors.

Finland has gone undefeated in the tournament, and eliminated the United States and Russia to reach the final. Sweden lost to Russia and Slovakia in the preliminary round, but beat Switzerland and the Czech Republic to reach the gold medal match.

Pre-tournament favorites such as Canada and Russia couldn't stand up to these teams from countries that have a combined population less than that of Florida, but more than their share of the world's hockey talent.

''I think it will be the biggest game ever,'' Finland forward Saku Koivu said. ''We all know the importance of it. There will be a lot of emotion involved.''

For good reason, too: Nearly two centuries ago, the two countries were one. But after Russia overran part of the country in 1809, Sweden ceded Finland to the Russians, and Finland didn't gain autonomy until 108 years later.

This is a friendly rivalry. Some players on opposing sides Sunday will go back to being NHL teammates Monday. But neither country wants to lose this game, especially since there is no guarantee a first Olympic final will be followed by a second.

[BullNBear52]

What a great story! Maybe the Russian figure skater would like to go fish her bronze medal out of the garbage and give it to the Norweign who came in 4th!

[BOREALIS]

'Mystery man' aids Canadian XC skier
Norway's coach Hakensmoen hands Renner new pole, helps skier take 2nd

By Mike Wise
Washington Post Sports Columnist
Updated: 6:02 a.m. ET Feb. 26, 2006

TURIN, Italy - Sara Renner was skiing the cross-country race of her life when she looked down at her pole and saw it had snapped.

She flailed and struggled uphill as the field passed her in seconds. And then something happened, maybe the most serendipitous, skin-tingling moment of the 20th Winter Games.

Another pole.

Out of nowhere.

Given to her by a person she would call “my mystery man.”

Renner was back in the team sprint relay final, trying for her first medal in three Olympics, thanks to a stranger.

The stranger turned out not to be Canadian. Bjornar Hakensmoen is the Norwegian cross-country coach. His skier had just passed Renner and was now in medal contention. He didn’t think twice about helping a competitor.

“Winning is not everything in sport,” Hakensmoen said. “What win is that, if you achieve your goal but don’t help somebody when you should have helped them?” Hakensmoen is genuinely surprised people even want to talk to him about his deed. “I was just helping a girl who was in big trouble. If you saw her, you would do the same.”

Amazing, no, an Olympic moment we never saw or may not have even heard about?
We were too busy listening to Chad disrespect Shani and Shani disrespect Chad. We were glued to America’s downhill cover boy, an oversold Alpine skier who literally Bode-ed the entire Olympics. Bode is a verb now. It means “to throw away.”

Clarity can be found at the Games if you look hard, a clarity that can distill someone’s character better than most life experiences. U.S. goalie Chanda Gunn, refusing to shake hands with the Swedish women’s hockey team after the Americans’ stunning semifinal loss. France’s Pierre-Emmanuel Dalcin, raising his middle finger after he failed to complete the Super-G. A pair of Austrian Nordic skiers, bolting the Games after Italian authorities began a drug investigation.

But character also comes out at the Games in ways that touch and inspire. Joey Cheek, the U.S. speedskater who donated the $40,000 he earned for winning gold and silver medals to the children of Darfur. Zhang Dan, the Chinese pairs figure skater who slid violently to the boards after being dropped by her partner, but got up, finished in pain and captured the silver medal.

Crass behavior, commercialism and gigantism are conspiring to do in the Winter Games. They keep getting bigger, less quaint, less about the athletes and their obstacles and more about the event. Like the Super Bowl, it is becoming more about saying you went, attending the parties, than experiencing the moment.

Yet Hakensmoen proved there is still an abundance of human majesty at the Olympics.

He was working his last Olympics as Norway's coach. Cross-country skiing is the country’s national sport, and Hakensmoen wanted dearly to bring medals back to his homeland. But he did not think twice when he saw Renner. This is what sportsmen do in Norway. Your opponent is down by means other than their own doing and you help them rise. Even if it means losing a medal yourself.

“They expect me to do such things,” Hakensmoen said.

Sara Renner learned she had Graves’ disease after the 1998 Nagano Games. Her thyroid was removed, but she refused to let the affliction end her career. She competed again in Salt Lake City, never finishing better than eighth in any event. In 2003, she married Canadian Alpine skier Thomas Grandi after the couple and their guests skied across the Continental Divide for a ceremony in the Canadian Rockies. Healthy again. Married. All that was missing was an Olympic medal.

In cross-country skiing, a snapped pole makes you a bird with a broken wing. The race is often over. Within seconds, she watched skiers from Finland, Sweden and Norway go by with Canada’s medal hopes.

“I didn’t even have time to have an ‘Oh, [no]!’ moment, it was all so fast,” said Renner, who took three or four wobbly strides before Hakensmoen appeared, pole in hand. Maybe 15 seconds had been lost.

Replacing a pole for an opposing skier is not a freak occurrence in Nordic skiing. In 2002, Italian gold medalist Stefania Belmondo went from first to 10th in the 15km race when her pole broke. Courtesy of a French coach, who handed her a pole, she caught and passed all nine en route to a stirring victory. The courtesy is even more prevalent in Norway.

“We talked about this as a group before the Games,” Hakensmoen said. “Our policy is to help others when they need help.”

"You have to help,"

Even when it costs your nation a medal? “How can you be proud of a medal if you win when someone else’s equipment is not working?” he said. “You have to help.”

The pole Hakensmoen gave Renner was seven inches longer than she was used to, but she recovered in the team sprint relay final. Canada was a scant 2.5 seconds out of the lead again. She and teammate Beckie Scott would go on to win the silver, collapsing into the snow like jubilant children afterward.

The Norwegians finished fourth. Not one person in Norway has sent Hakensmoen an angry letter about costing his country a medal.

Quite the opposite. Norwegians have applauded his sportsmanship, as have Canadians. A maple-sugar farmer in New Brunswick has mailed 800 liters of maple syrup to Norway. A hotel in Banff has offered a two-week stay, Hakensmoen said. Flowers and letters cover the front steps of the Norwegian Embassy in Ottawa.

Wild, huh, a 36-year-old man, admittedly never a good enough skier to make the Norwegian national team, is today an Olympic hero in Canada? Hakensmoen feels uncomfortable about the attention. He sounds like a man who returned a lost wallet to its owner. “Why would anyone think of doing something different?” he said.

“I think a lot of people are lining up to give me poles now,” Renner said, laughing. “You could really do well with all those vacations and food.”

A couple of days after the event Renner walked into the wax room in Pragelato, where the technicians prepare the skis for competition. The room was empty, so she left an expensive bottle of Italian Barolo wine with a note that featured a little picture of an Italian chef. “Grazia,” it read. Inside, Renner wrote, “Thank you for the pole.” The race had been on Feb. 14.

“He was my valentine,” Renner said.

She met him a few days later. “Thank you so much,” she said.

“No, thank you,” Hakensmoen said.

Sometimes you get so caught up in thinking too deeply and analytically about the Games that you forget to go outside in the sun, amid the mountains, snow and the authentic heroes. Sometimes you forget how a simple act of kindness and sportsmanship is what the Olympics were supposed to be about.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11570134/

[BOREALIS]

Men's Biathlon 15km Mass Start on Saturday, Feb. 25, 2006




Exhausted but golden
Germany's Michael Greis collapses after winning the Men's Biathlon 15 km Mass Start at the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics Saturday, Feb. 25, 2006, in Cesana San Sicario, Italy.

[BOREALIS]

I wonder how much longer his association wtih NIKE will continue??

[BOREALIS]

For weeks now NIKE has promoted "Join Bode"......

By Sally Jenkins, Sports columnist
Sunday, February 26, 2006; Page E01

Only Medal For Bode Is Fool's Gold


SESTRIERE, Italy For weeks now Nike has advised us to "Join Bode."
Join him where? At the bar?

That's one place you might find Bode Miller after the Turin Games, unless he's in his motor home, finding new ways to duck all that pressure he put on himself.


Miller is the biggest disappointment in the Winter Olympics, not because of the way he skied the mountain, but the way he acted at the bottom of it. The fact that he didn't win a medal at these Games, going 0 for 5 in the Alpine events, is beside the point.

It's not the winning, it's the trying. The point is that he acted like he didn't try, and didn't care. Failing is forgivable. Getting fatter on beer while you're here is not.


If there has been a weaker performance by an American athlete on the international stage than that of Miller, I'm hard-pressed to think of one. To hear Miller tell it, he spent more time in Sestriere's nightclubs than he did in actual competition, which amounted to less than eight minutes. Miller's final Olympic event, the slalom, lasted all of 16 seconds. He bulled out of the start house, did a couple of quick scrimshaw turns, and promptly straddled a gate.

Fair enough -- Miller has struggled in the slalom this season, finishing just two of eight races, and it was a tough course. Nine of the top 29 skiers in the competition did not finish. It was Miller's behavior afterward that sealed his reputation as the goat of the Games. He thrust his hands in the air, stuck out his tongue, and waggled in mock celebration. Then he skied off the course, avoiding the cameras and throngs of people at the bottom of the hill. When Associated Press reporter Jim Litke found him later, he declared, "Man, I rocked."

Then he delivered a disquisition on his Olympic experience. "It's been an awesome two weeks," Miller said. "I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level."

Let's review his awesome two weeks. Miller arrived in Turin sullen and defensive, and blew his chance in the downhill when he lost time on the bottom of course, probably as a result of his lack of fitness. He blew another medal in the combined when he led after the downhill portion, but straddled a gate in the slalom. Next, he blew up a gate in the Super-G, and then insulted his rivals afterward by saying he wasn't one of those guys "who skies 70, 80 percent and gets on the podium."

Miller has worked awfully hard to reach this point; the relationship he has built with the public is the one he himself has constructed over many months. He was impossibly over-hyped coming into the Winter Games between Nike's ad campaign, his autobiography, and those nipple-baring magazine covers, all of which he cooperated with and cashed in on. Miller took the world's biggest ego bath -- until he realized it was going to be difficult to satisfy Olympic expectations, especially in a field chock full of Austrians.

Now he wants to distance himself from all the hype and commerce. "The expectations were other people's," he told the AP. "I'm comfortable with what I've accomplished, including at the Olympics."

The about-face has left Miller so confused that he can't get his stories straight. In one breath, he talks about giving it his all, and in the next, he talks about how hard he drank during the Games. "I just did it my way. I'm not a martyr, and I'm not a do-gooder. I just want to go out and rock. And man, I rocked here."

Or: "My quality of life is the priority. I wanted to have fun here, to enjoy the Olympic experience, not be holed up in a closet and not ever leave your room."

Miller's act has clearly worn on his coaches, and Bill Marolt, chief executive of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, suggested that officials would have "a heart-to-heart" talk with Miller at the end of this season regarding his behavior. Nor would Marolt speculate if Miller would be back on the team. "I don't believe we should have conversations like this in the media," Marolt said. "But clearly it will be something we will address at the year's end, and I don't know where that will go right now."

What they should tell Miller is this: Everyone can sympathize with his struggle to meet unrealistic expectations. And everyone respects what Miller has done on skis, from his two silvers at the Salt Lake Games to the overall World Cup title last season. But nobody respects the Bode Miller who showed up here -- maybe not even Miller himself -- and unless he can compete respectably, he shouldn't return to the team. There are few things less worthy of respect than the athlete who pretends not to care about the outcome. It's a bail-out position, a protection and an excuse. If you pretend not to care, then no one can say you really lost. Miller never committed to these Olympics, never put his ante on the table. He sauntered around the Games as if he was just here to watch.

Which is mostly what he did.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/25/AR2006022501546.html

[BullNBear52]

Ligety has even grown weary of trying to defend him...

Ligety said that sometimes it was impossible for Miller to live up to all the expectations placed on him. He wondered if the pre-Olympic hype was not too much. Ligety, who could be a mainstay on the United States ski team for years to come, already seemed uncomfortable talking about Miller so much. A little hopefully, standing near the finish Saturday, Ligety added, "I think I've gotten to the point where I shouldn't be having to talk about Bode."

[BullNBear52]

50 kilometers = 31.0685596 miles.



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