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Thursday, February 23, 2006
No American heroes at these Games
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Turin, Italy — Second place went to the girl who fell twice. Third place went to the girl who fell once. So it follows that first place had to go to the only girl who didn’t look like she was wearing fins.
“I definitely didn’t think I was going to get any medal when I finished skating,” Sasha Cohen said Thursday. “So it was a nice surprise.”
No surprise here. Actually, what unfolded Thursday night perfectly punctuated the last two weeks. This has been the Oakland of all Winter Olympics. Gertrude Stein wrote of that city, “There is no there there.” We can’t be certain if there’s a there here, either. But whatever it is, it looks a lot like Macon.
The free skate of women’s figure skating finals is the signature event of the Winter Olympics. It is the toughest ticket. It draws the highest ratings. It means a possible supply of Campbell’s soup to the winner. But, waiter, there’s a fly in the Olympics.
This was the last best chance for an athlete to save the Games of Turin. Didn’t happen. Nothing against Shizuka Arakawa, who skated gracefully. She made it through four minutes without rump and ice becoming one. She won and deserved the gold medal. But she basically won by process of elimination.
Sasha Cohen fell twice in warmups, then, proving practice pays off, fell twice on triple jumps to open her routine. Russia’s Irina Slutskaya, a silver medalist four years ago, also went splat on a triple. It was like picking the prize pumpkin after watching the other two fall off the back of a pickup and onto the highway, only to get run over by a Winnebago.
What makes the Olympics a wonderful thing is it creates fresh and special moments. Summer or Winter, every Games has an athlete or team that grabs the spotlight and screams, “Mine!” It might be a gymnast from Romania or a ski jumper from Finland.
This is where Mark Spitz becomes a legend, Nadia Comenici becomes a global sweetheart and Jamaican bobsledders become a movie.
Michael Phelps creates unrealistic expectations, then surpasses them. Kerri Strug brings a Willis Reed moment to gymnastics. Ben Johnson flashes, OK, then crashes. We watch because they represent something spectacular (or amusingly catastrophic). We watch because this is an every-four-year exercise, with athletes we might never have heard of before, and possibly never will hear from again.
But that hasn’t been the case here. These Olympics have been the Shrug of Turin.
Bode Miller, the biggest potential star, is 0-4 in his four Alpine ski events. He has run into a gate, been disqualified for missing a gate and twice finished out of medal contention.
Miller warmed up for the slalom Wednesday by turning his ankle playing basketball. His final calamity is scheduled for Saturday. He isn’t headed for the Wheaties box. He is headed for the cover of National Lampoon.
The women’s hockey team shockingly failed to reach the gold-medal game. The men’s hockey team shockingly failed to register a pulse. I would say that when it came to expectations, both fell. But then if they were figure skaters, that would qualify them for silver medals. (Two of the three medal winners in men’s figure skating also fell in the finals).
Apolo Ohno wiped out. Michelle Kwan was a quick photo op. Speedskaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis each have won a pair of medals, but neither duplicated an Eric Heiden haul, and any great athletic moments they’ve achieved have been smothered by a slap fight not nearly as entertaining as Tonya and Nancy.
Cohen seems like a sweet kid. She’s certainly an honest one.
She was so convinced she wouldn’t medal after her skate that she couldn’t bring herself to watch the competitors that followed. Instead, she went back into the dressing room to change clothes.
She could’ve been a great story. She had fired coaches, only to reunite with her first one. She had battled through injuries.
After all of the long-skate fizzles that have plagued her career, she could’ve pulled a Mickelson and actually finished first once.
Instead, she fell twice.
She talked about two treatments and two drugs (“a nice combination”) that were needed to ease her pains. Addressing the whole collapsed-under-pressure theme, she said: “I wasn’t nervous, but I was a little bit apprehensive, knowing I had missed the flip and the lutz in warmup. When people are watching … it’s kind of hard to go out there like you’re getting churros at Disneyland.”
Nobody said being center stage was easy.
Right now, center stage is empty.
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Duke. Ehhh…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
After seeing them in person, I don’t know about the Dookies. I’ve thought all along they were going to win the national championship, but now I’m beginning to wonder. If a bad team like Georgia Tech can make 70.8 percent of its first-half shots against you, that doesn’t say much for your on-the-ball defense. Something else that doesn’t: Despite the presence of Shelden Williams, who leads the ACC in blocks, Duke is 10th in the ACC in field-goal percentage defense.
I wonder, too, about Duke’s ability to run its offense against big, quick defenders. Would Williams score 20 points against the massive UConn front line? Would Greg Paulus get the ball past halfcourt against Villanova’s pressure? Would a team that goes 10-deep wear out the Devils, who use only seven players and who count on Redick playing 40 minutes every time out?
I know, I know. Other good teams have issues of their own. (Example: Can any UConn man save Rashad Anderson make a 3-pointer?) But the more I see of the ACC, the more I’m convinced it’s no better than the third-best league in the country this season — behind the Big East and the Big Ten, respectively — and I’m not certain that Duke’s unbeaten run through the conference tells us much about the worth of this team.
Bottom line: J.J. Redick will have to score 30 points six times in a row against NCAA tournament competition for Duke to win it all, and at least four of those games should be against better competition than anything the ACC has thrown up. I think J.J. Redick is a great player. I’m not sure he’s great enough to manage that.
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