TURIN, Italy – The Winter Games closed yesterday with Americans winning 25 medals, their most ever on foreign soil. It probably was the best campaign we fought here since Anzio in 1944.
Aerial skier Jeret “Speedy” Peterson was told to go home Saturday after punching a friend outside a bar. With friends like that, who needs enemies? But we made our usual share over the course of 16 days, internally as well.
After silver and bronze triumphs by Americans Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis in the 1,500, the speedskaters showed utter contempt for each other at the press conference.
Someday, when Bode Miller is asked: “What did you do in the war Daddy?” he’ll tell them he took his shots at The Irish Igloo the nights before each of his races turned worse than the last. After a third failure to finish in five cracks at a medal, Miller said: “I came here to rock and, man, I rocked.”
Hands down, that made him the No. 1 rockhead of The Games, quite the honor considering snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis hot-dogged a finish and blew a gold medal and Johnny Weir wouldn’t do his full program after a minor transportation snafu still left him plenty of preparation time to choke.
The men’s hockey team, talented enough to have lost to both finalists by only one goal, played its worst game in the one that counted. The women, considered shoo-ins for the final, got the boot by Sweden, a team that had not beaten the Americans in 25 tries.
Skiers Ted Ligety and Julia Mancuso had the only really unexpected triumphs by the U.S. over 16 days and speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno won something in three different races. But seven of the American medals came in snowboarding, now our national sport. The signature moment of the Games in most American eyes will be Sasha Cohen, falling twice with the gold within her grasp.
Cohen got up, bore down, and got lucky when nobody but Shizuka Arakawa skated better. Good for Sasha, and for every 15th place finisher who took his/her best shot, or every bronze winner who is going home thrilled. Success really is all about expectations. And even though our female curlers, who had medal hopes, bombed, do we really have to be good at even that?
So never mind how many we won, in relation to how many we were expected to win. It’s really how we behaved that made us losers here, even if the dark contrast made a few Americans beam even more brightly.
The smile on Emily Hughes’s face radiated the sheer joy of simple participation. In an event sibling Sarah had won and which little sister had no chance of winning, she came to skate her best and practically did.
Another oasis moment came when Joey Cheek nailed both the gold in 500 meters speedskating and an understanding of a much bigger picture than medal counts.
“I love what I do, but honestly it’s a pretty ridiculous thing,” he said. “I skate around in tights. I’ve trained my whole life for this but it’s not that big a deal.
“Because I skated well now I have a few seconds of microphone time . . . so I can either gush how wonderful I feel or use it for something.”
He then announced he was giving his winning $25,000 reward from the USOC to an organization to help refugees in Chad, then matched it after winning the silver in the 1,000.
Four years from now we’re going to have to remind you how many medals we won in Turin. But in rationalizing the medal count and blaming himself for unrealistic expectations, Jim Scherr, CEO of the USOC, also had to warn our Beijing Summer Olympics team to behave.
That’s our sad Turin legacy. We lost big when idiots showed up in numbers too ugly for a Joey Cheek to save.
