The biggest names you've never heard

I don't know about you, but I'm suffering from a bad case of Olympics fatigue. I can't take any more tiaras, tears, shin-anigans, pouty Russians, lascivious snowboarders or cigar-puffing women. I was beginning to think maybe I had missed the addition of boorish behavior as a medal sport.

So I thought today might be a good time to take a look at a couple of athletes who embody the Olympic spirit perhaps more than those who have been training their whole lives for it. I remember watching the opening ceremonies two weeks ago as an alpine skier from Ghana proudly entered BC Place stadium. Ghana in the Winter Games? Skiing? Well, why not.

Here's Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, who is expected to take part in today's slalom, making a pretty compelling argument for why he has as much right to ski in the Olympics as Bode Miller, Carlo Janka or Didier Defago.



And then there's Marjan Kalhor, the first female athlete from Iran to compete in the Winter Olympics. She was last among the finishers in the giant slalom on Thursday and in yesterday's slalom, but was happy and proud to be representing her country at the Games. Now that's class.





Fit to be the best

A big congratulations to American skier Lindsey Vonn, who yesterday won gold in the women's downhill, beating the competition by an impressive margin and outskiing the weight of the expectations heaped on her by the U.S. media before the start of the Winter Games.

It's worth noting here that Vonn owes much of her success on the mountain these past few years to her training off of it. She is widely considered the fittest woman on the World Cup circuit, spending countless hours at the gym working on her strength, endurance and balance.

You can find a look at Lindsey in the gym here.

Let the Games begin!

There was a time when I loved watching the Olympics, but not so much anymore. I realized this last night when just 28 minutes into the opening coverage of the Winter Games in Vancouver, I found myself thoroughly bored. Granted, I was perhaps rushing to judgment, since last night's broadcast had very little to do with sport and much to do with pomp and circumstance, which I've never been terribly fond of.

Less than an hour into the broadcast, there had already enough faux intrigue and drama to make me turn my attention to other matters. Whatever happened to just covering sport for sport's sake?

Instead, the network parcels out its coverage in small doses of feel-good narratives, interspersed between monstrously expensive commercials.

It was hard last night to watch athletes from country after country come parading into BC Place stadium, all smiles and waving flags and bright colors, just hours after luger Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia had lost his life in an Olympic training accident that was sickening in its suddenness and violence.

Life does not always lend itself to tidy narratives.

The tarnished gold standard

This was pretty predictable, given the great American obsession with success in the Olympics, but I saw a story the other day with the headline "Will 2010 Games become the Vonncouver Olympics?" The play on words was a reference to Lindsey Vonn, the talented American skier who is currently battling it out with her close friend Maria Riesch of Germany for the lead in the overall World Cup standings.

"The what standings?" you ask. Don't worry, you're not alone. Even if you're a skier, if you're not a fan of ski racing, you probably have no idea that there are a whole host of races and events every year, and not just every four years when the Winter Olympic Games come around.

This is especially true in the United States, where it's almost as if ski racing didn't exist, except for the Olympics. That's one reason why that headline bothered me, because we've gone this route before, mostly notably in 2006, when Bode Miller arrived in Turin, Italy, as a favorite — at least as far as the American press was concerned — to sweep all five Olympic skiing events, but left without a single medal.

So was Bode a failure? There's no point in delving into that question, particularly since all things Bode can get a bit complicated. But I do know that were I to ask any male racer on the World Cup circuit which prize in skiing he covets the most, he might just as readily answer the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbühel, Austria, as any Olympic gold medal. Female racers would probably say it was the overall world cup title, something Lindsey Vonn has won the last two years.

If Vonn doesn't win a single medal in the mountains near Vancouver next month, she will still rank as the most successful female ski racer in U.S. history to date.

So if you're not a skier, you're probably saying, "Who cares?" Well, like most of my seemingly obscure posts here, I see a parallel to our everyday lives. This occurred to me a couple of nights ago when my partner's niece called to tell us that she had made the dean's list at the University of Vermont. While I was genuinely happy for Chrissy, I said to her, "Congratulations, but we were very proud of you already."

Chrissy reminds me of my own niece, Stephanie, who recently completed graduate school and embarked on a career as a physical therapist. They are both highly intelligent, talented, genuine and compassionate young women whom I admire — the sort of people who make you think, "If only there were more like them in this world, the world would be a better place."

My point is, I think we focus too much on outcomes, the "gold medals" in our own lives — the high test score or job promotion or whatever marker of success we happen to be striving for — and not enough on the process, the small accomplishments that make us who we truly are. Gold medals are perhaps overrated.

Lindsey Vonn is a ski hero no matter what happens in the upcoming Winter Games. And my nieces Chrissy and Stephanie are everyday heroes, dean's list or not.

Soaring with the men

With the 21st Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, less than a month away, it will soon be time to showcase some of the world's best athletes, right? Well, not exactly, because there's one group of highly skilled athletes who you won't be seeing in these games: female ski jumpers.

A group of female ski jumpers filed suit in 2008 to be allowed to participate in the Vancouver games after the International Olympic Committee voted not to include women's ski jumping in 2010. The women pursued redress in the Canadian courts based on the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, among other things, bans discrimination based on gender. In the end, they were denied when Canada's Supreme Court declined, without comment, to hear appeals of lower-court rulings that the charter does not apply to the selection of Olympic events.

The International Olympic Committee based its decision not to include women's ski jumping in Vancouver on what it said were technical criteria, in that there were two few elite competitors and too few countries that would compete to justify its inclusion. The committee left the door open to including women's ski jumping in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Let's face it, ski jumping is a pretty obscure sport, at least in North America. If they were asked to name a jumper, most people, including myself, would probably be hard-pressed to name anyone other than perhaps Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, the British jumper who made a name for himself in the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary by being endearingly bad.

Ski jumping has been, since its first inclusion in the Olympics in 1924, largely a sport of European men.

Among the other compelling theories that have been advanced about why the women were not allowed to compete in Vancouver is that there would be no money to be gained from it. The Olympic Games are a big source of advertising dollars, and those dollars usually chase the biggest events and the biggest names in sport.

But when all is said and done, I have to wonder, too, whether the women were not included because they pose a threat to the good-old-boys network. In most sports, were the best women allowed to compete against the best men, in almost all instances the women would lose — and lose in a pretty sound manner.

Ski jumping could have a very different outcome, however. Lindsey Van (shown above), an American jumper and one of the plaintiffs in the Canadian court case, holds the North American distance record — 171 meters, or 563 feet — and also has jumped farther than anyone — man or woman — on the 90-meter jump built for the Vancouver games.

Is it just coincidence that the IOC denied her bid to compete on the very hill on which she holds the record? We probably will never know. Van is now 25 years old, and it is doubtful that she would be a participant in the 2014 Games, should women be included by then.