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Monday, February 25, 2002

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

SALT LAKE CITY -- When he arrived at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, Derek Parra was just another anonymous speed skater with a part-time job in the flooring department at Home Depot, which pays Olympic-caliber athletes full-time wages to allow them to train and support themselves.

He is going home with two medals, including one gold, and a world record.

And, if he plays his cards right, a promotion, he said after winning the 1,500 meters. "Maybe they'll move me to lumber."

He's not the only U.S. athlete who has exceeded expectations at these Olympics.

When the U.S. Olympic Committee announced in April 2001 that it expected American athletes to win 20 medals in Salt Lake City, it was denounced for having a severe case of over-optimism. But the Americans have exceeded even those rose-colored expectations, winning a record 34 medals, including 10 gold.

"I feel like a proud mother today," USOC President Sandy Baldwin said.

For goodness sake, they almost won the medal count, something they hadn't done at the Winter Olympics since 1932, when the Games were in Lake Placid, N.Y. Only Germany, with 35 medals, won more than the United States.

The U.S. team's previous biggest medal haul came in 1998, when it won 13 medals in Nagano. This team tied that mark on Day 8 of 17.

"I knew this would be a special team from the moment I began meeting with the athletes and living in close quarters with them," said Dwight Bell, the U.S. team's chief de mission. "I don't think anyone knew just how special it would be, not just in terms of medals won, but in sportsmanship and doing their best."

So what happened? Why didn't these Olympics belong to the Norwegian cross-country skiers and the Dutch speed skaters and the obscure athletes from obscure countries?

There's the home-field advantage, of course, the endless chants of U-S-A (which, to be fair, were tempered at most venues and far from obnoxious) and the notion that athletes compete at their best when they are comfortable, as they are when their family and friends are nearby and everyone speaks their language.

Some U.S. athletes were, literally, at home in Salt Lake City. Of the 211 U.S. athletes, about a fifth of them moved to Utah to train for the Games.

But such an explanation is too simplistic. Other, more important, factors went into creating the biggest Winter Olympics medal haul in U.S. history.

Most obvious is the proliferation of what people here are calling "dude sports." Snowboards were invented in the United States, by a Vermonter named Jake Burton. No one heard of freestyle aerials until Americans started doing them. Women's hockey? There are only three true Olympic-caliber teams in the world, and the U.S. team is one of them.

At the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, there were 38 medal events. This time, there were 78, and many of the newer events are ones in which the United States excels. That's probably not a coincidence, although it might not be enough evidence to prove the existence of a vast, North American conspiracy.

"You'll find that perhaps more than half of the U.S. team's medals came in these new sports," Olympic historian David Wallechinsky told the Chicago Sun-Times. "They were put in because they play well into a number of American markets. And the guys in marketing and [NBC] realized they were losing the youth audience. This has successfully brought back that audience."

In fact, it apparently has won a few converts, too, including Gordon Hinckley, 91, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (Which has kept to the background during the Games.)

"That halfpipe thing! I've never seen it before. Oh! I just enjoyed it," Hinckley told USA Today. "It was crazy to get down ... and cavort about."

Of the U.S. team's 34 medals, 14 came in sports that have been added since 1980 -- freestyle skiing (three silvers), snowboard (five medals, including two gold), skeleton (three medals, two gold) and short-track speed skating (three medals, one gold).

The men's snowboarding team swept the medals in halfpipe, something the Americans hadn't done since 1956, when they swept the men's figure skating.

U.S. women are also an important part of the mix. Women's sports are more mainstream here than in some other countries, and so American women often get an earlier start in these sports and are more ready when they get to the Olympics.

Four years after winning the first gold medal in women's hockey, the U.S. team settled for silver in Salt Lake City. This time, the United States won the first gold medal in women's bobsled.

The United States also appears to be making better use of its large pool of athletes. Parra is Mexican-American, double speed-skating medalist Jennifer Rodriguez is Cuban-American, short-track phenom Apolo Ohno is Japanese-American; figure skater Michelle Kwan is Chinese-American.

And in a truly groundbreaking accomplishment, Vonetta Flowers, the brakeman on the USA-2 bobsled, became the first African-American to win an Olympic gold medal at the Winter Games.

Four days later, two African-American men won medals, bobsled pushers Randy Jones and Garrett Hines.

The Winter Games still are overwhelmingly an event for white athletes, but the playing field is gradually expanding. Such an occurrence benefits the United States more than, say, the Netherlands.

"We have the biggest melting pot in the world," Rodriguez said after earning her second bronze medal. "The one special quality about the United States is we are so diverse. I hope these Games can open everybody's eyes to the possibilities and the opportunities."

Widening the possibilities for winter sports athletes might actually have made the biggest difference, at least in disciplines in which the United States has not traditionally dominated.

After the U.S. team was humiliated at the 1988 Calgary Olympics, winning just six medals, a commission was appointed to study what went wrong. The commission, headed by George Steinbrenner, issued its report a year later. Noting the number of athletes who finished fourth, fifth or sixth, it recommended that more money be spent on developing the athletes in the years leading up to the Games.

Then, after the 1998 Olympics, knowing the next Olympics were in its back yard, the USOC started a program called Podium. About $18 million has been spent on everything from sports psychologists to finding and keeping the best coaches to actually giving stipends to athletes so they can meet life and training expenses.

"That's really what it's about," Baldwin said. "You have to have coaches that will stay with the program for a while and not just be with it for a year, and have athletes that really take eight years to develop a full cycle."

The speed-skating team was probably the Americans' biggest surprise. They were literally competing on their home ice, having trained at the Utah Olympic Oval for a year and a half before the Olympics. And they won eight medals, more than any other American team.

The team had balance -- six athletes won at least one medal. Compare that to 1980, when Eric Heiden won five by himself.

"This is the first time our sponsors have gotten behind us and really treated us like professionals," Parra said. "We're on a level playing field with the Europeans. Some of them make $1 million a year to skate."

The challenge now for the USOC is to maintain the funding and the level of expectations. Most host countries substantially boost their medal count, partially because companies are more likely to sponsor a sport or an athlete when the competition takes place in their own country.

"While our Olympians have been performing on the field of competition, we've been hard at work off the field," said Lloyd Ward, the new CEO of the USOC. "We're finding that the interests from our sponsors transcends where the Olympics are held. There is a tremendous amount of support for what we do. It will be a challenge, but we'll be in the game."