On the Games: Pure Sport, Raw Emotion

The Wall Street Journal
February 22, 2006

By Stefan Fatsis

Pragelato, Italy—It’s east to be cynical about the Olympics, about the little girls in spangly dresses and the perfectly edited images beamed around the globe, about our cultural obsession with victory or failure, but nothing in between.

Just four American newspaper reporters showed up in this breathtakingly picturesque, cloud-enshrouded valley yesterday to watch the final event in one of the most obscure sports in the Games. Just two of us were still standing as snow fell and an Olympian let down his guard at the end of a career.

The sport was Nordic combined, as popular as Nascar in Scandinavia but a mystery almost everywhere in the U.S. except Lake Placid, N.Y., Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Park City, Utah, homes to the country’s biggest ski jumps. Combined combines two skiing disciplines pretty much invented in Norway, jumping and cross-country. Before either became separate sports in the early 1900s, there was combined.

Entering these Olympics, the U.S. had never medaled in it. Austria, Germany and Finland have been the recent powers — they finished in that order in the team competition here last week — and Norway still does well, too. But with a fourth-place team finish in Salt Lake City in 2002; a world championship gold for the wonderfully named Johnny Spillane in 2003; a slew of top-three finishes by Todd Lodwick, arguably the best U.S. Nordic athlete ever; and a rising talent in Bill Demong, the Americans had reason to hope.

“I see our chances as just as big in any of the races,” Norwegian-born U.S. team coach Bard Elden told me in December at a competition in Lake Placid. “I see that we have three shots at medals.”

On the first day of Olympic competition, in the 15-kilometer event, Mr. Lodwick placed eighth, Mr. Demong 15th and Mr. Spillane 30th. Five days later, the U.S. finished seventh of nine in the team event, four skiers taking two jumps and then racing five kilometers apiece. Afterward, Mr. Lodwick said the fourth racer, Carl Van Loan, was out of shape and shouldn’t have been included. Mr. Van Loan said Mr. Lodwick, who has trained on his own, had never been a team player.

So the environment wasn’t great for yesterday’s finale, the individual sprint: one jump followed a couple of hours later by a 7.5-kilometer race. The jump didn’t go well. Of the 48 entrants, Mr. Spillane placed 14th, Mr. Lodwick 19th and Mr. Demong 30th. Skiers race at intervals based on those results. The Americans would have to start between 1:05 and 1:34 after the leader, an insurmountable gap in a race of under 20 minutes. “I’m trying to figure out what just happened,” Mr. Demong said after his jump.

“Bill got severely hosed on the wind,” U.S. ski team spokesman Tom Kelly said after listening to the coaches’ walkie-talkie communications. Mr. Demong had to start when there was no headwind, which increases loft. Mr. Lodwick had the same problem.

Medals were out of the question. But the Americans skied hard and well on the three-lap course, which was located about a mile from the jump hill. Mr. Lodwick climbed to ninth place, Mr. Spillane to 10th and Mr. Demong to 25th.

Afterward, Mr. Demong, 25 years old, said he would continue his low-budget training lifestyle and return for a fourth Olympics. “I feel like I’m close,” he said. Mr. Spillane, also 25, needs shoulder surgery but also is expected to keep competing.

For Mr. Lodwick, 29, though, this was a fourth and final trip to the Olympics. He didn’t want to talk after the race; he skied away, watched the flower ceremony for the medalists — an Austrian, a Norwegian and a German — and visited with his parents.

As snow, temperatures and twilight fell, he returned. Mr. Lodwick said he jumped “like a bag of trash,” especially disappointing because he had done well in practice after a couple of days in France after the team event with his wife and seven-week-old daughter.

Then he reflected on the end. “You set your mind to something and you have four chances,” he said. “I’ve been an Olympic champion 100 times in my head.”

Mr. Lodwick said he had won six events in his career and finished in the top three 35 times. “You just would hope that one of those times would be the Olympic Games,” he said. “It’s a goal that I’ve had for 15 years and this was my last chance to do it.”

His voice choked. He began to cry. “I just wish I could have accomplished that goal.”