It's curiosity, no doubt, but you have to figure Mike Friedman also is poking the wound a smidge to see how much it still hurts.

"I'll be having a drink at a bar with some buddies and I'll ask someone random, 'Hey, did you ever hear about this?'" Friedman said during a stop home this week.

Yes, they always tell him. They heard about the American guy at the Olympics who wore the anti-pollution mask and caused a big stink that swirled from Beijing to all corners of the planet.

Friedman, a cyclist from Peters, was that guy.

Is that guy.

Four months later, Friedman hasn't completely broken free from what happened in China. Life won't let him.

For instance, he searched Google to find a photo of himself to take to a speaking engagement Saturday at the Children's Museum.

"Fifty percent of all the pictures that came up were of the mask," he said. "It's so damaging to my name."

The double whammy came in his only Olympic event, a tag-team Velodrome race called The Madison. His partner, Bobby Lea, a Penn State graduate, had burned out in an earlier points race and his shot legs turned the U.S. pair's good start into a last-place finish.

"I was pretty depressed," Friedman said. "You shoot for one goal for a long time. You keep going, going, going, going. Every single day you wake up thinking Olympics, Olympics, Olympics. You do everything right -- diet, training, sleep, people you associate yourself with. Then when it's over, especially the way things happened, it's like, now what? You have to reassess your goals and look forward to something else."

Although Friedman, 26, has a long-range plan to get to London for the 2012 Games, he will spend 2009 concentrating on pro road racing with Team Garmin/Slipstream. For the first time, he is assembling a personal staff to guide him in nutrition, gym training, Eastern medicine and the like.

He will try to forget how the United States Olympic Committee let down the four cyclists who were photographed -- and Friedman interviewed -- coming through the Beijing airport wearing the masks that the USOC commissioned. USOC officials distanced themselves from the mask controversy, publicly wrung their hands over any possible embarrassment to the Chinese, and persuaded the athletes to apologize.

He will try to forget the outcome of The Madison, that he came away with no medal to put to the pedal.

The road calls.

"This will be the first year where it's strictly road," Friedman said. "No health issues. No track. Just road."

He has rented a place in Spain, the European base for Team Garmin/Slipstream, and will continue his world travels, starting with the spring classics. The first is the hot, sandy Tour of Qatar. Perhaps his biggest race will be at the end of the summer, the Vuelta a Espana, or Tour of Spain. It's a multi-stage race akin to, but not as renowned as, the Tour de France.

By then, he hopes to transform his body for the climbs.

Friedman, who is adept at endurance and sprints rather than specializing in either, doesn't have the body type usually associated with cycling -- what he calls "emaciated." They call him "Meatball."

If for some reason things don't go well at some point during his road races, he'll be ready to handle it.

"I learned how to carry yourself when you're really in a low spot," Friedman said. "It didn't get much lower than having the mask issue and then getting dead last at the Olympic Games when you went there to score a medal."

Don't get him wrong. Friedman isn't a downer.

You only had to check out what he wore to a coffee shop one morning to figure that out.

He couldn't find two matching socks, so he put on one blue sock and one blue argyle sock.

And then there was the orange T-shirt. On the front, it read, "This meatball ain't kosher," above a picture of him in the infamous mask.

On the back was the definition of "kosher," and an example of it used in a sentence:

"Apparently it is not kosher to wear a high-tech, pollution-fighting mask in the Beijing airport."

Friedman talked of maybe getting in an overnight camping/hiking trip while he's home. He gushed over friends from high school, Jared Marks and Dave Williams, who traversed the Appalachian Trail this summer. He described the beauty of the aspens in fall in Colorado, where he trains.

You get the strong sense that he'll be fine.