Flight of the wonder boy

If ski jump hero Simon Ammann never grows up, we won't mind.

By Gary Kamiya

Feb 14, 2002 | Wednesday was a pretty rocking day in the land of high-speed, low-friction sports, as observed from my low-speed, high-friction Barcalounger. World records, melodrama, serious injury, ludicrous recoveries from impossible mistakes, more bizarre skating allegations, a half-Japanese blur on the ice and, above all, a Swiss kid who didn't know any better flying into history -- all in all, it was a fine and entertaining three and a half hours.

I could get used to this TV-watching thing. It's great to be at the games, choosing where you actually want your eyes to go and all that, but the logistics are a bitch. If you were actually in Salt Lake, you'd have to have a wayback machine, a helicopter, a thousand bucks' worth of tickets and the world's best binoculars to see the show NBC served up -- and even then, there's no guarantee that Bombay Sapphire would be available at most venues. In fact, judging from the complete absence of those "colorful roisterers in the local taverns" features that the networks have usually rolled out by now, choices in that critical area must be extremely limited -- which is why there are probably more hip flasks in Salt Lake City right now than have ever been collected in one place in the history of the world. Braying Swedes do not bray on enthusiasm alone.

The evening kicked off with women's 500 meter speed skating, featuring what the commentators called the biggest lock of the Games, Canadian Catriona LeMay Doan. Doan is the Marion Jones of the short ice, basically unbeatable -- she tends to win whatever she enters, she won gold in Nagano -- and she breezed through the first of her two runs at the top of the pack. There is something oddly inspiring about watching someone who is just plain better than anyone else, like Michael Johnson or the great hurdler Edwin Moses. It arouses an atavistic, Beowulfian, you-swing-the-baddest-broadsword-so-hail-to-you kind of reverence. Competition is democratic, but it's tense -- it's good to relax with a little divine right of kings from time to time. She'll try to ascend the throne again Thursday.

Then came the men's combined, the downhill-and-slalom contest that determines the best all-around skier in the world. The story line was the battle between two likable, slightly grizzled Norwegian comrades who have dominated the sport for years, Lasse Kjus and Kjetil Andre Aamodt, vs. an upstart American, Bode Miller -- with a creaking, old-as-Methusaleh, 35-year-old Swiss guy named Accola thrown in to preserve the pathetic, the-older-I-get-the-faster-I-was delusions of middle-aged male spectators. The Norwegians stormed through their usual smooth downhill runs, but that apparently isn't how Miller does business. He got really gnarly really fast.

It happened toward the bottom of the run. Coming out of a turn Miller shifted too far back on his skis, his weight pulling him backward and to the side, and suddenly, shockingly, he was down, his left hip scraping along the ground, his left ski kicking out at a crazy angle that had compound fracture written all over it and his entire weight carried by the edge of his right ski -- all of this as he careened along at merging-on-the-freeway speed. But he somehow bounced back up, held his line -- I don't know from skiing, but I know a little about bike riding, and there's something similiar about the way forward motion is your friend when you screw up -- got his skis back together and made it across the finish. At the bottom he made the fist-pounding-on-chest gesture that universally denotes "pass me my brown pants." It was the most unbelievable recovery I've ever seen.

But it looked like that ridiculous Keystone Kops-like escape was going to be for naught when Miller -- a slalom specialist -- screwed up his first slalom run, leaving him still an eternal two and a half seconds behind. His self-critique after the first run was lucid and brusque in that cool way jocks sometimes have of dispassionately analyzing their screwups, and he didn't seem to hold out much hope that he was going to get on the podium. But then he just nailed the second slalom -- NBC's helpful high-tech "ghost" superimposition, where you can see two skiers' runs overlaid on each other, clearly showed how his superaggressive line from gate to gate shaved big time off the lead. It was a monster run, everyone except Aamodt faltered and in a stirring comeback Miller ended up taking the silver to Aamodt's gold, losing by a quarter of a second. The great Aamodt, with six alpine golds, had moved into rarefied Olympic territory -- and Miller had carved himself out a nice little memory-niche, too, as the Silver Houdini of the Salt Lake City Combined.

Then came the touted short-track skating debut of Apolo Anton Ohno, former bad boy raised by his Japanese-born single dad, possessor of a chin soul patch, 19-year-old recipient of Gen X cutie-pie hype who is this year's American multimedal hope. One of those fireside features narrated by Jim McKay tried to pump up Ohno as someone who missed being a reprobate by a hair -- which would have been a more compelling story if they had given any examples of the supposedly dissolute life he was tempted by. Did some al-Qaida supporter (Johnny Mosely?) offer him a joint? We don't know. All we heard -- aside from the fact that he was a latchkey kid who is close to his dad -- was the usual I-hit-bottom-after-I-finished-last tale, followed by Sonny Rollins-style woodshedding in a remote cabin to get his chops back, followed by a triumphant return to competition.

McKay also made an attempt to present Ohno as wise beyond his years. That may be true, but the young man's gnomic utterances -- that life is "a journey" and "a big circle" -- might reflect not Buddhist-tinged wisdom so much as the fact that he has been skating around in circles for years.

Next Page: A Swiss kid flies away

• View blog reactions