Olympic Sports

So you make it home after a long day at the luge track, crash on the clunky sofa bed and turn on the TV, hoping to kick back and unwind.

Not a chance. Not with Italian TV.

We have an ancient 13-inch TV set with 13 channels. Twelve of them broadcast Italian shows exclusively. Only one of them is multilingual — MTV.

I never knew how much I missed closed captioning.

Then again closed captioning might have made it worse.

Channel 8 showed more than 100 people dancing in a conga line to an Italian rendition of “Roll out the barrel.”?

Channel 3 featured a moderator (referee?) trying to keep order as four men debated (yelled?) about some poll results.

Tuesday night at the luge track I heard what quite possibly was the best sports chant ever.

Yeah, I know. The best sports chant - at a LUGE track?

No, my brain isn’t frozen. This chant was extraordinary.

It was better than “Darr-ylll ”¦ Darr-yllll,”? that fans used to taunt Darryl Strawberry.

It was better than “Who’s your daddy?”? that Yankees fans chanted to bedevil former Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez.

It was even better than “That’s alright, that’s OK, you’re going to work for us someday.”? (This one may be apocryphal, but supposedly Northwestern students used it when they used to get pounded in Big Ten football.)

I do enjoy my job, but that's not to say that I agree with everything that we do. Yesterday I overheard one of the workers at the luge venue commiserate with a couple of American journalists.

“The luge athletes aren’t very charismatic, are they?”? drawing nods and grunts of agreement.

That’s the rub. Sure, journalists want the athletes to be heroic, brave, and talented. But for many journalists it’s not enough that the lugers are hurtling down an icy track at 80 miles per hour with their head just inches above a rock-hard surface. No, more than anything, many journalists want athletes to be colorful so they can write a good story.

Everybody says how lucky I am to attend the Olympics. I must admit that I’ve had some amazing good fortune at previous Games.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics I saw the U.S. women’s basketball team rout South Korea for the gold medal and Carl Lewis lead a 1-2-3 sweep in the 200-meter-dash.

At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics I saw Lewis win his fourth gold medal in the long jump, and Michael Johnson set a world record in the 200-meter-dash that no one has since come remotely close to.

At the 2000 Sydney Olympics I saw wrestler Rulon Gardner pull off one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history when he beat the “invincible”? Alexander Karelin.

I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when I arrived at Ai Cinque Cerchi restaurant at 10 pm on Sunday night and the place was packed.

Italians eat late. Italians eat slow. But they sure make a darn good pizza.

I ordered a pie called the Superbo. I’m still not sure what was on the Superbo, but it was fresh, light, tasty and aptly named.

So on a scale of one to five, this ristorante's food gets 4 ½ stars. But the service? Well, let’s just say that Italian waiters specialize in making you wait. Either that or they are all training to be magicians, because they're experts at disappearing. When you finally catch their attention, inevitably they say, “One moment.”? Trust me. The Italian definition of “one moment”? doesn’t match yours.

So Washington D.C. has been hammered by up to a foot of snow, and we haven't seen any snow here at all. What gives?

There is plenty of snow on the ski slopes, although some of it is man-made. But the streets in the mountain village where I'm staying are bare. And Turin down in the valley is completely snow-free.

It's been sunny and relatively warm during the days. But rest assured, it's plenty cold enough to snow at night.

Truthfully our job is easier without snow. The buses run smoother. Our notebooks stay drier. We don't slip and fall as much.

But this is the WINTER Olympics. We need some snow, at least for appearance-sake. Otherwise this seems a little like celebrating Christmas in Florida. A chilly Florida, that is.

Confidence is essential for an athlete.

Overconfidence is the kiss of death.

Very few young athletes manage to walk the fine line between the two extremes.

Hannah Kearney, a 19-year-old moguls skier, thought she had the right balance. She found out differently on Saturday afternoon.

Kearney, the defending World Champion, told reporters earlier this week in Turin that, "I'm not here to lose."

Saturday in the preliminary round of moguls Kearney finished 22nd out of 30 competitors, and failed to advance to the finals.

One run and Kearney's Olympics were done.

Hopefully her balance - both on and off the snow - will be better next time.

Friday night before the Opening Ceremony I experienced one of those indelible moments that could only happen at an Olympic Games. In a bathroom, no less.

I was preparing to wash my hands, when I saw an older man struggling to get soap out of the dispenser. He needed to reach underneath and behind the dispenser and pull it toward him, but he couldn’t seem to figure it out. I told him to reach further back — “toward the wall, then pull.”? Then I gestured what to do. A-ha! He turned, gave me a big smile and said “Merci.”?

I had already scrubbed my hands with soap, but when I put them under the faucet, the water didn't come out. There were no handles, so it had to be an automatic faucet, right? I waved my hands around and up and down, but nothing happened. I tried again in the next basin, and the next. Nothing. Augggh.

I saw my first athlete competing Friday. I also missed my first photo opportunity.

We went up to the luge and bobsled track, ostensibly to get a credential for my colleague, Thom, who lost his at the Paris airport. But while we were there we also decided to check out the venue’s media center to see if the Internet worked . We don’t have Internet access in our room, nor do we know of any place that offers it in our little village of Cesana Torinese.

So after Thom got his credential, we hiked up Mount Luge. Naturally the media center was at the top of a steep, treacherous hill. Fortunately it wasn’t snowing. Anyway, the path took us right up to the track, and the women lugers were doing practice runs. Literally I could have reached out and given a luger a high five — had I wanted to lose my hand. Instead I got out my camera and prepared to take a shot of the next competitor.

So what did you think of the Opening Ceremony? Like most Opening Ceremonies, parts of it were majestic and inspirational. But other parts were mystifying and incomprehensible.

Like you, I watched the Ceremony on TV. We are stuck with Italian TV, so much of the context was probably lost in translation. Whenever someone spoke in English, the TV announcers translated the words into Italian.

I’m not sure what NBC’s broadcast was like, but I’d imagine that they focused on the women who carried in the Olympic flag. Especially one woman.

Susan Sarandon.

Susan Sarandon?

Hey, she’s a fine actress, but she sure seemed out of place here. When I think of American women and the Olympics, athletes like Florence Joyner-Kersee, Jenny Thompson, Bonnie Blair or Picabo Street come to mind.