Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
February 22, 2002, Washington Post

A Winter Olympics Wonderland

I can't get enough of the Winter Olympics. Like everyone else I have been watching the Games for the past two weeks. All this TV time has got me thinking. Here are some great Olympic thoughts and some not-so-great Olympic thoughts:

• You know what has to be the worst job at the Olympics? The person on the bottom of the sled in doubles luge. Hurtle down an icy track at 70 miles per hour with someone in a rubber suit lying on your stomach? No thanks.

• During this Olympics, I fell in love with some sports I never thought I would like. After watching Apolo Anton Ohno, I am nuts for short track speed skating. There's a sport with everything: hairpin turns, high-speed crashes and photo finishes. Side-by-side snowboarding was super cool too. But the biggest surprise for me was cross-country skiing and biathlon. Did you see the 4-by-10K cross-country relay between Norway and Italy? A 24-mile race was decided by a couple of inches. What a great race.

• Another great race was Bode Miller's wild and crazy adventure in the Alpine combined. Miller almost crashed in the downhill, messed up on his first slalom run and then came back with the race of his life in his second slalom run to snatch the silver medal.

• Even bobsledding, a sport that I think is a bit boring (every run looks the same to me), gave this Olympics some of its best stories. Like Vonetta Flowers being the first African American to win a Winter Olympic medal, snaring gold with driver Jill Bakken. And the poor United States two-man bobsled team: After four runs, they missed out on a medal by three one-hundredths of a second. That's the blink of an eye.

• The biggest bobsled story before the Olympics was Jean Racine. She was the American driver who dumped her best friend and brakeman, Jen Davidson, because she thought a new brakeman would give her a better chance at a gold medal. It didn't work. Racine came in fifth place.

Lots of people thought Racine was real mean. But I see kids do stuff like that all the time. They leave their friends on neighborhood or school teams to join Classic and travel teams so that they have a chance to be a better ballplayer. Isn't that the same thing as Racine?

• Hey, what is the story with the ski jumpers' uniforms? I know the uniforms are supposed to help the skiers jump further, but some of them are so big and baggy that the athletes look like they are jumping in a hand-me-down suit from their father.

• Talking about ski jumpers: Gold medalist Simon Ammann from Switzerland looks so much like Harry Potter that I expect him to have a part in the next Harry Potter movie. All the guy needs is a lightning bolt on his forehead.

• I guess we can't talk about this Olympics without mentioning the figure skating. This year, the fans spent as much time watching the judges as they did watching the skaters. I wonder whether the changes in judging will make the sport better and more fair for the next Olympics.

But I am not really wondering about figure skating. No, what I am wondering is: What am I going to do after Sunday when there are no more Winter Olympics to watch?

© 2002 The Washington Post Company