Winter Olympics Paper Chase

Many is the time an idea that looks good on paper ends up working out terribly in reality. Put a a complex of five glass skyscrapers in the heart of downtown Detroit? Sounded good on paper. But when the Renaissance Center opened less than thirty years ago, in was viewed as an urbanist and architectural disaster. Give Michael Cimino $36 million to make a Western as a follow-up to The Deer Hunter? Again, it must have seemed like a good idea on paper. But when Heaven's Gate premiered in the fall of 1980, it ended up bankrupting a studio and either seriously damaging or ruining several acting careers in the process. Let Bush confidante Karen Hughes improve America's image abroad for the State Department? Wait a minute . . . that idea doesn't even look good on paper!

Well, what about the opposite? How about something that works well in practice looking bad on paper? Sound implausible to you? Yet, that's the perverse position the 2006 U.S. Winter Olympic team finds itself in. In case you haven't noticed - and you probably haven't - the U.S. team that went to Torino has, as of yesterday, collected fifteen medals - seven gold, five silver, three bronze - tying with winter sports powerhouse Austia for third place overall in the medal count. (Broken down by gold, silver, and bronze medals, Austria has exactly the same number of each as the U.S. Again, these totals are as of yesterday.) Only Germany and Norway have fared better. On paper, though, the Americans haven't done so well. Our star athletes, the ones who get most of the attention, have stumbled considerably - Michelle Kwan bowing out of figure skating after two days, Bode Miller leading virtually the entire U.S. ski team into defeat like lemmings into the sea, American men being shut out of solo figure skating.

This seems unfair, of course. Several Americans have won big here, but the dimming of the brightest U.S. stars have led Yanks to avoid the Winter Olympics like high-value coins. Perhaps it's to be expected. Two months ago, thanks to generous media exposure, anyone could have identified Michelle Kwan or Bode Miller on a newspaper sports page in two seconds flat, but no one outside Tanith Belbin's adopted home state of Michigan neither knew or cared who she was. Ditto her partner Ben Agosto. Same for speed skaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis - and now they're getting more attention for the bad blood between them then the good performances they've turned in so far. And, unless the person in question was younger than thirty, no one you asked could have picked anyone from the entire snowboarding team. And for some strange reason the media seem to have given extra time to Lyndsey Jacobellis for the showboating that cost her a medal in snowboard cross racing.

So, just because the U.S. team doesn't look like they're doing as well as they are, their countrymen and countrywomen have tuned out. Too bad. They're missing a team that's turning in the second best overall performance in U.S. Winter Olympic history - after the 34 medals won in Salt Lake City four years ago - with five days still left. And the men's 1500-meter speed skating race tonight features four American gold medalists - Davis, Hedrick, Joey Cheek and Derek Parra. As for ladies' figure skating. . . right now, Sasha Cohen looks to have the best chance of winning the gold medal for the U.S. of A., but she's not the favorite.

Maybe she just doesn't look good on paper. :-p