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.
AI
