olympic sports

SALT LAKE CITY - It was a day for reveling in Utah's Olympic glory days of a decade past, and giving serious consideration to trying to do it again a decade hence.

Although it balked mightily, the Olympic caldron at Rice-Eccles Stadium was relit for a few minutes this week to mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the highly successful 2002 Winter Games.

A week after the great American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe died in 1953, his family had just finished dinner and was gathered for an all-night mourning ceremony at their tribal homelands near Shawnee, Okla. when suddenly, a hearse with a police escort pulled up.

The Russian government does a great George Steinbrenner impersonation.

VANCOUVER - Want an example of pure amateurism at the Olympics? You won't get it from many of the athletes.

Four years ago he was left off the Olympic team in what is widely acknowledged as one of Hockey Canada's bigger boo-boos in recent years.

So this was supposed to be Sidney Crosby's Olympics.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - So I'm sitting here in the pressroom at Canada Hockey Place and who should walk by but Donald Sutherland, proud and bearded Canadian.

Sutherland has been big here at the Winter Olympics, from his regal turn in all white, helping to carry the IOC flag in the Opening Ceremonies, to attending various events.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - There aren't really that many hockey nights in Canada, at least not in the way we Canadians imagine them.

Apolo Anton Ohno's record-setting seven Winter Olympics medals and the U.S. win over the Canadian men's hockey team serve as reminders of even grander accomplishments 30 years ago.

Each night for the past week and a half, the Vancouver Winter Olympics have entertained us, thrilled us, given us reason to cheer.

But what haven't these Olympics given us yet? That signature moment -- that frozen-in-time, I-can't-believe-what-I-just-saw moment that has us standing in the driveway with a neighbor the next day reliving it.

"Too much thinking.''

That was the explanation Team Canada hockey coach Mike Babcock offered up to explain Dan Boyle, his wandering, and at times lost, little defenseman.

But Babcock could well have been speaking for his entire team -- perhaps even the entire country.