Rome's 2020 withdrawal: an alarm bell

The files for Rome's 2020 bid had been printed in Milan. They had been loaded onto a delivery van. The van was now idling by the Colle del Gran San Bernardo, the St. Bernard pass, the historic conduit between Italy and Switzerland, ready to be delivered to International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne. All that was waiting was the go-ahead from the central government, the final OK from premier Mario Monti.

On Tuesday, the word came to the driver: Turn back. You're not heading to Switzerland.

Monti, in a move that immediately underscores the European debt crisis but truthfully points to so much more about the financial underpinnings of the Olympic movement, put a stop to Rome's bid the day before the deadline for the submission of those bid files, saying the Italian government could not provide the required financial backing the campaign required at a time of economic crisis.

The costs for playing host to the 2020 Games in Rome: a projected $12.5 billion.

Monti said the government didn't feel "it was responsible to assume such a guarantee in Italy's current condition," adding it "could put at risk taxpayers' money."

What this is -- and let's be clear -- is an alarm bell.

It can, and will, be spun a lot of different ways. But it's an alarm bell. The IOC is a European institution. When a bid from the heart of Europe for the Summer Games, the IOC's main franchise, decides in the most public way that it's too expensive to play, particularly because the signals from the Rome campaign were that they were going to focus on venues already built and the notion of a "sustainable" Games -- that has to be a major cause within Olympic circles for concern and evaluation.

Not, though, panic. Let's be straightforward about that, too.

Indeed, this should be emphasized: The IOC's financial health is, in many respects, sound. Evidence of that is NBC's $4.38 billion investment in televising the Games in the United States through 2020. Moreover, IOC president Jacques Rogge, prudently, has spent years compiling a reserve that would enable the IOC to withstand a financial hit so severe that it could go for an entire four-year cycle if it had to do so.

That said, there needs to be considerably more clarity and reality in the bid process, and if Rome's demise can precipitate that -- so much the better.

It's the case that such clarity can be problematic; you're asking for financial forecasts seven in the future, and events in the real world can indeed have a way of overtaking such estimates. Even so, the numbers that get published in some bid books can sometimes amount to polite fictions. The public contribution for the 2012 London Games is now $14.6 billion, nearly three times what was estimated during the 2005 bid.

London, indisputably, was a quality bid. The IOC's financial health depends not just on television billions and sponsors but, as is constantly discussed within its headquarters, the Chateau de Vidy, attracting a succession of quality bid-city candidates.

It has had challenges, though, attracting Winter Games fields. The 2018 derby drew only three candidates -- Pyeongchang, South Korea, which won, along with Munich, and Annecy, France, and Annecy, which ultimately drew only seven votes in last July's election, obviously was one of the most lacking bids that ever drew IOC scrutiny.

There are now five "applicants" left in the 2020 mix, and in no particular order: Madrid; Istanbul; Tokyo; Doha, Qatar; and Baku, Azerbaijan. Come May, it remains unclear whether the IOC will let all five go through to what's called the "candidate" phase, the 16-month run to the September, 2013, vote for 2020.

When the likes of Rome, site of the 1960 Summer Games, have to drop out and you're left with Baku in the mix -- not to say that Baku isn't or might not be qualified, but who really thinks that Baku is going to win the 2020 Summer Games?

It also highlights a point -- and the irony here is inescapable, given that it comes from one of the leading European technocrats of our time -- that American bids have been saying for years:

The IOC guarantee structure, which calls on full government backing for the Olympic enterprise, may well be problematic. Perhaps the notion deserves renewed study -- and, more important, a better appreciation within the IOC of the benefits of a private-public guarantee partnership of the sort that the unsuccessful Chicago 2016 bid offered.

From the IOC's perspective, you can well understand why it wants full government backing. Look at those London numbers one more time -- a three-time ballooning of the costs. The IOC itself isn't about to be on the hook for that kind of money. So who is?

Well -- the government in Baku would be. No problem!

That only begs the obvious question: Do the IOC members want to go to Baku?

From an American perspective, it's simply not prudent to ask taxpayers to foot that kind of bill. There's no way Joe Six-Pack would ante up. Absolutely no way.

That's why the private-public deal that Chicago had structured was so innovative. A unanimous Chicago city council vote gave then-Mayor Richard M. Daley the authority to sign city and state guarantees interwoven with the added support of privately purchased insurance. This plan ought to be better understood and embraced by future bids, and by the IOC members, as a sensible risk-sharing model.

Of course, Chicago went out in the first round of IOC voting in Copenhagen in October, 2009, with just 18 votes; Rio de Janeiro won the 2016 Summer Games.

This is not sour grapes or to say that Rio was not deserving.

The point here is the guarantee, and what it means for 2020 and future bid contests.

There's another possibility here worth considering:

Mr. Monti made his decision to scrap Rome's bid after meeting last Thursday at the White House with President Obama. One recalls that Mr. Obama traveled to Copenhagen to lobby the IOC on behalf of Chicago, the first time the American president had ever put his prestige on the line before the IOC in such a way -- only to get slapped down, and vigorously, by the IOC members.

If Mr. Obama and Mr. Monti discussed Olympic bids, it doesn't take much to imagine what the president might have said to the premier about the wisdom of moving ahead -- or, probably, not. It also doesn't take much to imagine how much consternation the premier's visit to Washington must have occasioned within the Rome 2020 bid committee, knowing how the president had been treated by the IOC in Copenhagen.

Mario Pescante, one of Italy's senior IOC members, said in a statement issued by the Rome 2020 committee that it was "with a heavy heart" that the bid was ending. "But life, as in sport, is often determined by events beyond one's control so we must responsibly accept the decision of our government and re-focus our energies on the broader goals of Italy itself."

Which don't include the Olympic Games. At least for a long time.

Where track and field is sexy and knows it

DONETSK, Ukraine -- In his time, it was enough that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. People cared, and a lot. Back then, track and field mattered. In their day, the likes of Edwin Moses, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffth-Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee could just run fast and jump far. A great many people found track and field itself relevant and interesting.

Now, track and field lives on the margins of professional sport, especially in the United States, except for one week every four years at the Summer Olympics, when it commands Super Bowl-like attention. As ratings and attendance figures at other times have demonstrated conclusively, it's not enough anymore to just to run and jump -- or even throw.

So when Kylie Hutson, a rising American pole vaulter, took her runs Saturday night here at the 23rd annual running of the "Pole Vault Stars" to the strains of LMFAO's  "Sexy and I Know It," playing to the crowd because she's sexy and she knows it -- hey, it was showtime.

Brad Walker, the 2007 world champion, ran the runway to perhaps the one G-rated sentence in the song "Move Bitch" from Ludacris. The noise shook the roof. The crowd roared.

Traditionalists may cringe. But this is the direction track and field inevitably has to move, a combination of sport and entertainment, if it wants to engage the paying public.

The Druzhba sports hall in Donetsk holds roughly 4,000. To get there, fans had to brave temperatures of minus-20 centigrade, or minus-4 Fahrenheit. The place was packed; at the start, the lines at the concession stands were three deep. The show went on for three hours, the vaulters going off on brown runways set off against a blue background, one of the guys, then one of the women, at the height of the action a vaulter going off every 90 seconds, all the time the music kicking. For three solid hours the Druzhba was an all-in track-and-field house party.

Generally, a standard-issue track meet comes off like an out-of-control circus. For the average fan, there's too much going on, all of it seemingly at one time. The genius of an event like Pole Vault Stars is that it's a break-out deal, pole-vaulting only; there aren't any competing distractions on a surrounding track; moreover, you don't have to be a track and field geek to understand what's going on.

That's what makes the concept so easily transferrable:

Why not lithe female high jumpers in Las Vegas? Studly male shot putters in downtown Manhattan?  (On Wall Street?) Why not street races down Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Bourbon Street in New Orleans?

In England, they already hold a street race in Manchester. At the Diamond League meet in Zurich last September, the shot put events -- men's and women's -- were held in the entrance hall of the main train station.

Track and field has to think like this, out of the box, to get to the ultimate goal: to make the sport once again not only relevant and interesting to the average fan. That is, must-see. For American supporters, the aim has to be to pack a place like Cowboys Stadium -- with that big-screen TV -- by the 2020 or 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials, and one day to bring the world championships to the United States.

It can be done. Usain Bolt has shown that there is space in a crowded sports landscape for a single track and field personality.

At the same time, there is much to overcome.

Moving beyond the sport's well-documented doping issues -- for decades, track and field has ceded the show to other sports.

The NBA, for instance, is Jack Nicholson and Spike Lee and, to invoke the legendary voice of Lawrence Tanter announcing the obvious between breaks at Staples Center, Laker Girls.

Name even one celebrity associated with recent editions of the U.S. Olympic track trials -- or, for that matter, the U.S. track and field season.

Still waiting …

During the Major League Baseball season, they put on sausage races at Miller Park in Milwaukee, and people care. No, really! They care so much that "Famous Racing Sausages" is trademarked.

The NFL, of course, offers up military flyovers and cheerleaders and, at the Super Bowl itself, the halftime rock-and-roll spectacle. Why wouldn't track and field want to be more like the NFL?

Or, for that matter, the UFC?

Who, a few years ago, had even heard of the UFC?

"Look at the UFC and what Dana White has done. He has marketed the hell out of his athletes," Walker said here late Saturday night. "We have tremendous athletes. Nobody knows who any of us are."

Added Jeff Hartwig, the 1996 and 2008 Olympian who was in Donetsk representing Hutson, "You can make the general public fall in love with you if you put money and time into it, and we," meaning track and field, "don't do either."

Track and field's credibility as a would-be major sport is not just limited to the United States -- though it is there that it may be most on the line. As just one example: The Millrose Games moved out of Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, a number of European indoor meets this winter disappeared, including the seeming fixture in Stuttgart.

Mind you -- this is an Olympic year.

"A lot of competitions are dead," said Germany's Björn Otto, who finished a strong second here.

He added at a news conference, referring to Pole Vault Stars, "We need these competitions. It's promoting track and field as attractive for the world. And spectators can see that."

This meet began in 1990, started by Sergey Bubka, the 1988 Seoul Games pole-vault gold medalist who went to high school in Donetsk. "For me," Bubka said, "we must offer sport as a combination -- with excitement, sport as a show. It gives a different impact. When you do this, the people love it."

Bubka is now a vice-president of track and field's international governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations, and is on a short list of those believed to be positioning themselves for the succession -- whenever it might occur -- of the elderly IAAF president, Lamine Diack. Bubka is also an International Olympic Committee member and president of the national Olympic committee of Ukraine.

Asked if the pole-vault meet might be a play to advance his political interests, Bubka demurred. "What kind of promotion for myself? I didn't need that. I dreamed to do well, to promote my city. It was Soviet times. It was my dream to give the people two to three hours of entertainment."

Which has shown staying power. Samsung has become the title sponsor. Coca-Cola and others are also in, their executives saying they were happy to be on board because the Donetsk event delivers a family friendly audience.

Bubka, meanwhile, is forever tinkering with the format: "It's my baby and every year we try to do something different."

The show Saturday night featured mock-ups of both the Parthenon and Big Ben, tributes to the Olympic Games' Greek heritage and this summer's London Games, and a dance-number opening ceremony.

In all, 24 athletes took part, including the two Americans.

There were vaulters from Cuba, Brazil and all over Europe. Each of the vaulters got to choose his or her own music. Four picked the French artist David Guetta; in a sign of the opportunity just waiting there, virtually everyone else chose an American artist or a U.S.-based musical act, the choices ranging from Eminem to Rihanna to Jennifer Lopez.

This was a no-slouch field.

Renaud Lavillenie of France, the 2009 and 2011 world championships bronze medalist, won the men's competition at 5.82 meters, or 19 feet, 1 inch. Otto, recovering from Achilles' injuries, made the same height but took second on count backs.

Germany's Malte Mohr, the 2010 world indoor silver medalist, came in third.

In recent years, Russia's Yelena Isinbayeva, the Beijing 2008 gold medalist, had ruled the women's competition in Donetsk -- indeed, setting eight world records here from 2004 to 2009. She was a no-show this year, having jumped at a meet just three days before in Bydgoszcz, Poland -- going 4.68, or 15-4 1/4.

That opened it up for Jiřina Ptáčníková of the Czech Republic, fifth at the 2010 world indoors, who jumped 4.70, or 15-5, a personal-best and a national indoor record.

"I like music," she said afterward. "It's special -- to have a track and field meeting set to music is special."

Cuba's Yarisley Silva, her silver navel piercing shaking with every step, took second, at 4.60, or 15-1, also a national record. Hanna Shelekh, a local, just 18, the third-place finisher at the Singapore 2010 Youth Games, took third Saturday, also at 4.60, a Ukrainian record.

Hutson finished fifth in the women's competition at 4.50, or 14-9; Walker, sixth in the men's field at 5.62, or 18-5 1/4.

"When you see its in person, you see how successful it can be," Walker said afterward, "it clicks."

Ross Powers' moment of perfection

Ten years ago today, Ross Powers launched himself into the brilliant blue Utah sky. Ross first slid down into the frozen wall of the halfpipe and then rocketed right out of it, way above its icy lip and hung there, 40 feet up, maybe more. For perhaps a second, he was flying, literally flying, testing the pull of gravity, a black silhouette against the blue, emblematic of humankind's eternal push to be greater than anything that had come before.

It was, for a moment in time, perfect.

The Olympic Games are rich with moments and memories, and over the past few editions, Summer and Winter, there have been so, so many:

Jason Lezak's out-of-body final lap in the pool to save the 400-meter relay for the American team in Beijing. On the track, Usain Bolt's 100- and 200-meter runs at those same Olympics. Cathy Freeman's overwhelming 400 in Sydney.

To compare snowboarding to swimming or track and field is of course apples and oranges. Yet the essence of the Olympics is that instant where everything comes together to produce a transcendent moment, one of lasting memory.

"It's one of my favorite memories, too," Ross was saying the other day on the telephone, laughing, and as it turns out he was taking the call in Park City, Utah, where the 2002 snowboarding events were held. He's now director of snowboarding at the Stratton Mountain (Vt.) School, and was in Park City with a bunch of the school's kids.

Ross came to those 2002 Games as the 1998 Nagano Games halfpipe bronze medalist, among other accomplishments. He was one of a number of 2002 medal favorites.

The day before the 2002 halfpipe was his 23rd birthday. The morning of the event, as the crowd was starting to form at the bottom of the hill, he ran into his mom, Nancy, and his younger brother, Trevor. Ross said to them, just making conversation, "Hey, what are you guys doing tonight?"

Nancy replied, full of confidence, "I'm going to the medals ceremony!"

Ross recalls now, "I just kind of laughed."

The tension broken, Ross just went out there and ripped it. The pipe itself was huge and fast and everyone knew it. The U.S. Ski Team crew, along with the guys at Burton, had Ross' board waxed just so to maximize performance.

The trick that Ross performed to perfection is a basic maneuver in a snowboard pro's repertoire. It's called a method air or, alternatively,a method grab. It's the same trick in skateboarding -- after sailing off the pipe (or skateboard ramp), the rider reaches down his or her hand and grabs the edge of the board, between the feet. When it's done to form, it looks like you're kneeling in mid-air.

Even though it's relatively basic, the advantage of the method grab is that -- when you hit it -- it can produce amazing amplitude, which is snowboard talk for big air. What no one yet knew, until Ross threw it so spectacularly, is that starting with the 2002 Olympics big air was the way to go.

At the Nagano Games, because of the way the rules worked then, it really wasn't that way. In his moment in the sky, Ross forever changed the rules of the game. Shaun White and everyone else -- they would follow Ross.

He felt that morning like he was in on a big secret: "It feels good," he recalls thinking, "to have a big trick."

Especially one he was going to throw first. That would get the crowd into it, big-time.

"I dropped in," Ross recalled, "and let it flow along the right wall … and then went smooth through the flats and definitely did the biggest transition I ever did in the halfpipe," and up, up, up he went.

Most calculations are he went 18 to maybe even 22 feet off the lip of the pipe, at least 40 feet up. "It felt smooth and easy," he said, adding, "When I was in the air it just felt good. I was just confident and had the feeling, no question, I was going to land it."

He landed it, and followed with more complex tricks, ones involving the sorts of gymnastically oriented spins and rotations that are part of the snowboarding landscape.

About three-quarters of the way through the run, he remembers thinking, this could well be a gold-medal run -- don't blow it: "You gotta land, you're almost to the bottom, you have a good run, just keep going and finish."

He did.

The judges gave him a score of 46.1, way ahead of the rest of the field.

Two other Americans rounded out the medals: Danny Kass took second, 3.6 points back of Ross, and J.J. Thomas third.

The 1-2-3 sweep was the first time Americans had swept the medals in an event since 1956. That had been in men's figure skating.

The day before, American Kelly Clark had won gold in the women's halfpipe.

The U.S. team's performance in the halfpipe in 2002 is largely credited with pushing snowboarding from the fringe to the mainstream.

Ross remembers being with Kelly at the Daytona 500, just days later. "These elderly women were meeting us and saying, 'You guys are great! Snowboarding is so great! I want to get my grandkids on those boards!' It was huge for snowboarding."

Beyond his work for the Stratton school, Ross remains actively involved in promoting his own foundation, which he launched in 2001, the year before the Salt Lake Games, to help athletes with the talent but not the support they might need.

Meanwhile, an extension of the Ross Powers Foundation, the Level Field Fund -- launched about 18 months ago -- provides grants covering everything from instruction to entry fees to travel. Michael Phelps, Daron Rahlves and Seth Wescott have helped out; the fund has already awarded more than $220,000 to more than 50 athletes in sports such as snowboarding, swimming, skiing, judo and skeleton racing.

Ross and his wife, Marisa, are by now the parents of two little girls. Meredith is 4. On her snowboard, she is good on heel edges already and, Ross said, "That's really cool to see." Victoria is 8 and, as it turns out, spent the 10th anniversary of her dad's victory out on Bromley Mountain in Vermont -- where Ross himself learned to ride -- racing in her very first boardercross event. Guess who won?

Perfect.

Apolo Ohno: "Everything is great"

Apolo Ohno, the eight-time Olympic medalist, has always lived life by a simple and yet powerful credo: Dream big. And then work hard and go make it happen.

That was Apolo appearing in a third-quarter Super Bowl commercial Sunday for Century 21, the real-estate concern, along with Donald Trump and NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

Apolo is a big football fan but, to tell the truth, he didn't watch the New York Giants' 21-17 victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI. Instead, he had to fly Sunday out to the islands, to resume filming his scenes for the television show "Hawaii Five-O." After a couple days on set, he's due to fly to China and Japan -- as a global ambassador to  the Special Olympics. While he's in Japan there are meetings as well with the royal family. In Japan, Apolo also plans to spend some time with his grandmother.

"I'm great, man," Apolo said in a recent phone call from Las Vegas, where he was in a series of business meetings. "Everything is great."

For Apolo, two years after the Vancouver Olympics, everything really is great.

Last fall, he ran the New York Marathon in 3 hours, 25 minutes and 14 seconds -- beating his goal by nearly five minutes.

He stars in Subway commercials and now that Century 21 ad.

"You know what's awesome?" he asked, then answered: "An Olympic sport having a Super Bowl commercial. I don't know the last time I saw one. That, to me, is awesome. I am really proud of that. You know, we have come such a long way. It's great."

Apolo's next-projects list can sometimes seem breathtakingly endless.

"You have to manifest success," he said. "The more and more you concentrate on it," whatever "it" may be, in this case "it" being in front of the camera, "the more and more it's likely to happen. Every single thing in my life I have wanted I have been able to somewhat get in some fashion."

What's next? More of this hectic, amazing, great life.

If you can believe it, it's 10 years already since the Salt Lake Olympics, and the crazy race that catapulted Apolo onto the national -- indeed, the international -- stage, the 1000 meters that ended with a tangle just shy of the finish line, Apolo sprawled on the ice along with everybody else in the race but Australia's Steve Bradbury, who had been trailing by roughly 30 meters, just coasting along. With everyone else down, Bradbury coasted across the line first, his arms raised in disbelief, Australia's first-ever gold medal winner at the Winter Olympics. Apolo got up first and threw his skate across the line to take second.

It's still one of the great moments in Olympic history.

Bradbury went on to become an icon in Australia. They issued a postage stamp in his honor, and "doing a Bradbury" is now part of the Australian lexicon.

Apolo, being Apolo, was never -- not even for a moment -- anything but gracious. Indeed, he has always celebrated the race, and the moment, and Bradbury's accomplishment.

Ten years on, meanwhile, Apolo is still in killer shape.

Apolo gets asked all the time: are you coming back for Sochi and the 2014 Winter Olympics?

Keep this in mind:

Eight is Apolo's number. He has eight Olympic medals, the most of any U.S. winter athlete in history.

Not to say he wouldn't come back.

With Apolo, never say never.

"I am working on this short, 35-minute circuit I do. It's really ridiculously intense. It's called 'the asylum,' " he said, a no-rest and high-intensity morning workout designed by John Schaeffer, the Pennsylvania-based trainer whose Winning Factor sports science training program got Apolo into the shape of his life for the Vancouver Games.

Beyond that, Apolo said, he's weight-lifting, and has increased his upper-body strength.

Even so, Apolo said he and Michael Phelps had a recent conversation that revolved around "legacy and career," as Apolo put it.

Apolo said, "I have so many friends and fans who say, 'You have to come back.' And of course I love the sport," meaning short-track speed skating.

At the same time, having achieved over three successive Olympic Games, having seen that sports provided the springboard of the Apolo message, to dream and then achieve through hard work and dedication,  "I want to do something bigger."

He said, "Ultimately, I have never said, 'No, I'm not coming back.' As of now, it's not a priority.

"I'm trying to focus on things like the Special Olympics, charitable organizations and business organizations. There are other avenues and other things in my life I want to pay attention to.

"And now I have time for those things."

Sanya's Super déjà vu times two?

Four years ago, after David Tyree had somehow super-glued the football to his helmet and the New York Giants escaped with a crazy 17-14 victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, it all seemed possible under the stadium tunnel that Arizona evening for Sanya Richards-Ross. Her husband, Aaron Ross, a Giants defensive back, was now and forever a Super Bowl champion.

And she was on her way to the 2008 Beijing Games, the IAAF's 2006 female world athlete of the year with an American-record 48.7 in her specialty, the 400-meters. Nine times in 2006 she ran under 50 seconds. That year she literally went undefeated.

Ross' Super Bowl ring had to be an omen, right? Surely she would now be an individual Olympic gold medalist herself?

Fate works in funny ways.

Sanya Richards-Ross is indeed an Olympic gold medalist. She would go on to win gold in the 4x400 relay in Beijing with a stirring anchor leg.

The thing is, she had already won Olympic gold in that same relay, in Athens in 2004.

In the open 400 in Athens, she was not favored to win, and didn't, coming in sixth.

In the open 400 in Beijing, she absolutely was favored to win but did not. She came in third. She went out of the blocks hard, too hard. She was overtaken down the stretch by both Christine Ohuruogu of Great Britain and Shericka Williams of Jamaica.

In 2009, however, at the world championships in Berlin, Sanya won the open 400 decisively, in 49 flat.

Again, though, fate works in funny ways.

This past summer, at the 2011 world championships in Daegu, South Korea, Sanya struggled to even make the 400 final. She was hurt. And there was a lot on her mind -- a lawsuit with a former agent, contract issues, distractions.

In that Daegu 400 final, Sanya finished seventh. Amantle Montsho of Botswana won the race, in 49.56; American Allyson Felix came in second, just three-hundredths of a second back in one of the most thrilling finishes of the 2011 championships.

Sanya came home in 51.32.

Underneath the tunnel that night in Korea, Sanya vowed 2012 would be different.

A couple days ago, running indoors at a little meet in Fayetteville, Ark., Sanya opened her season with a 23.18 in the 200 and a 51.45 in the 400. Both were world-leading times, though Vania Stambolova of Bulgaria would run a 51.26 three days later in Vienna in the 400.

It's not that important that Sanya's times are world-bests in January. Nobody's giving out Olympic medals in the dead of winter.

What's telling is that she's turning out fast times while bearing a heavy training load -- the same way swimmers like Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte can win races in mid-winter even while churning out thousands of yards.

What's impressive, too, is that she decided to run in Fayetteville pretty much at the last minute. She hadn't done any real speed work and had, to tell the truth, been planning -- is still planning -- to run next Saturday in the Millrose Games in New York.

"To be ready to run that well, with the load I have right now in my training … is very exciting and it's how I hope to be able to model my entire season," Sanya said in a very quiet voice.

The reason Sanya was speaking so quietly was that she was in a hotel room in Indianapolis, and Ross -- that's what she calls her husband -- was taking a nap, resting a couple days before Super Bowl XLVI, and she didn't want to disturb him.

Ross has been a rock for Sanya, showing her -- yet again -- how to handle the ups and downs of being a professional athlete. This season, for instance, he was benched in Week Two after giving up two big pass plays to Danario Alexander of the St. Louis Rams. But with injuries to Terrell Thomas and Prince Amukamara, Ross got another chance to start. And he has been in the lineup since, opposite Corey Webster.

"It's funny," she said, speaking softly when asked to compare the experience four years ago with this year's Super Bowl week. "My hubby -- he is a man of few words. Nothing really gets to him. That is what I admire about him. He is always a happy camper.

"… That has helped me a lot this season. I am more emotional. I wear my heart more on my sleeve. He reminds me that is a business and that I shouldn't take things so personally. I shouldn't take these things to heart. That has helped me tremendously -- helped me a whole lot, not just going into this year but, I hope, the rest of my career."

Who knows what fate holds? It's a fact that when Sanya Richards-Ross is healthy she's as good as anyone.

"My training is right on schedule," she said, adding with a laugh, not too loud so as to be sure not to wake up her husband, "I don't want to make any predictions. We didn't make any predictions about Ross going to make it this far," and who would have predicted the Giants beating the Patriots four years ago?

"I'm just going to take it easy and have fun," she said. "I really, really want to claim my first individual gold medal. That is my target for sure."

A historic 50th for Lindsey Vonn

You wonder whether Lindsey Vonn is so good this season that the point has come whether she has simply imposed her will on everything and everyone around her. She did it again Saturday, winning the historic 50th World Cup victory of her career in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, even though temperatures in the Bavarian Alps were crazy cold and she had to survive a near-crash about halfway down.

Lindsey's winning time, in temperatures of -13 Fahrenheit, so cold that racers had to tape their faces to avoid frostbite, was 1:44.86. She trailed through the early intervals. Yet by the finish she was, again, first, and by almost half a second.

Nadja Kamer of Switzerland finished second, 41-hundredths of a second back. Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein crossed third, 79-hundredths back, for her third World Cup podium finish, all this season.

Last year's overall World Cup winner and a Garmisch local, Maria Höfl-Riesch, Lindsey's good friend and rival, finished fourth, in 1:45.85, 99-hundredths back.

At 27, Lindsey is the youngest woman to reach 50 World Cup victories. Only Annemarie Moser-Pröll of Austria, with 62, and Switzerland's Vreni Scheider, with 55, have more.

Of the three, Lindsey got to 50 the fastest, with just seven years between her first World Cup win and her 50th. It took Moser-Pröll eight years.

Men's racers with 50 or more victories: Ingemar Stenmark (86), Hermann Maier (54), Alberto Tomba (50).

"I mean, when I was a kid I dreamed of winning the Olympic gold medal and I wanted to ski like people like Alberto Tomba did," Lindsey said Saturday night from Garmisch on a conference call with a few American reporters. "But I never dreamed I would have reached the successes they reached in their careers.

"I still have a lot of years of racing in me. I have been at a loss for words all day. It definitely is something I never expected. It takes a lot of hard work to get to this many wins and it is a huge milestone in my career."

The Garmisch downhill, 1.8 miles long, is called the Kandahar. It's a course that, by now in her career, Lindsey knows well -- but, intriguingly, one she had never won.

Last year, they held the world championships on this course, and despite battling the effects of a concussion, Lindsey finished second.

All week, anticipation ran high that Lindsey would get that 50th victory. She had come oh-so-close to 50 last weekend in St. Moritz, Switzerland, winning first a super-combined (48), then a downhill (49) and then, last Sunday, coming in second, behind Höfl-Riesch in another super-combined by a mere three-hundredths of a second.

In Garmisch, there's an American military base essentially at the bottom of the run. During the week, Lindsey and others on the U.S. team had visited with some of the U.S. troops -- so she and the other American racers, as they always do there, had a built-in red, white and blue rooting crew.

Three other Americans finished Saturday in the top 15: Stacey Cook ninth, Laurenne Ross 10th, Julia Mancuso 13th. The U.S. women's team leads the downhill Nations Cup standing race -- over Austria -- by 433 points. Austria leads the overall standings with 3555 points, the Americans second with 2428.

At the second split, Lindsey trailed by 62-hundredths. Then came a bump about halfway down the course that saw Lindsey lose the inside edge of a ski and slide onto a hip and almost out of the race. Almost.

She recovered, found a line and made up time.

The U.S. head coach, Alex Hoedlmoser, who had been standing by the side of the course about 20 meters away from the spot where Lindsey almost went down, said afterward that watching her slip "stopped my heart a little bit."

But, he said, she "pulled it off like nobody else would."

She said, "I definitely gave the coaches a little bit of a scare there."

She also said, "I felt like I was down on my hip and then right back up again," the kind of mistake she has made before and assuredly will make again. "I do make mistakes quite a few times in downhill and super-G. I just have to keep my composure and ski the line I expect at maybe a more aggressive pace -- I have to keep my composure and keep going."

The victory Saturday was Lindsey's ninth -- already -- on the 2011-12 tour. She has won four downhills.

Of her 50 World Cup victories, 25 have been downhills.

Lindsey now has 1350 points for the season, a whopping 482-point lead over Tina Maze of Slovenia. Höfl-Riesch stands third with 746.

Lindsey leads the downhill points tally as well, by 230.

The next event: a super-G, on Sunday, still in Garmisch. Lindsey leads the super-G standings this season, too.

This season, of course, has come amid considerable turmoil in Lindsey's personal life. She split from her husband, Thomas. Lindsey's sister, Laura, was on hand in Garmisch as was her father, Alan Kildow, and stepmom. She said she was glad to be able to share the historic moment with family.

Make no mistake. The time that Lindsey gets on the mountain is, in many ways, sanctuary. When she's up there in that start gate, it just her and her very considerable will, alone.

The best two minutes of her day are coming right up. She couldn't be happier.

"I'm really enjoying skiing," she said in that conference call. "I feel like no matter what going on in my personal life I can put my skis on and go out and have fun.

"Skiing has been honestly the best thing for me in my life at this point. It's hard to describe. Things in the personal front aren't any better than they were a few months ago. I feel very clear-minded when I'm skiing. I enjoy it … it's just a different state of mind."

Lindsey Vonn: halfway to 2k

It was a perfect day for alpine skiing Friday in St. Moritz, Switzerland, site of the 1928 Winter Olympics, blue skies and no wind, the kind that makes you think about possibilities. They held the first super-combined race this season on the women's tour, and Lindsey Vonn won, her 48th career World Cup victory.

Slovenia's Tina Maze finished second, 41-hundredths of a second back. Nicole Hosp of Austria finished third, 58-hundredths behind.

Lindsey leads the 2012 season overall World Cup standings by 302 points over Maze. A victory would make for Lindsey's fourth overall title in the past five seasons.

Beyond that is where the possibilities start getting truly tantalizing.

It's not even the end of January. Lindsey now has 1,070 World Cup points.

No female racer has ever reached 2,000 for the season.

In 2006, Croatia's Janica Kostelic got to 1,970. In 1997, Sweden's Pernilla Wiberg reached 1,960.

On the men's side, Austria's Hermann Maier -- the Herminator -- reached exactly 2,000 points in the 2000 season.

It's not unthinkable now that -- if she stays healthy and if the weather holds -- Lindsey could reach 2k.

It's abundantly clear that Lindsey is racing this season with unquenchable ambition and desire.

Part of that is from last year -- the way the 2011 season ended, when Lindsey came up three points shy of winning the overall World Cup title, denied in measure because of bad weather after making an incredible late charge. Her good friend and rival, Germany's Maria Riesch, won the 2011 overall title.

Riesch -- who got married over the summer and is now Hoefl-Riesch -- is winless this season.

Meanwhile, and Lindsey has made this perfectly plain time and again, she absolutely loves to ski; her passion for ski racing has carried her through the rough patches these months in her personal life with the announcement of the divorce from her husband, Thomas. The two minutes or so of each race are time when all that can be left behind. It's just her and her skis and the snow and the mountain, and nothing else matters.

There are two more races to go this weekend in St. Moritz -- a downhill on Saturday and then another super-combined on Sunday, a make-up race from Val d'Isere in December.

Traditionally, Lindsey has done very well indeed in St. Moritz. The victory there Friday made for the sixth podium finish there in her career.

The downhill is Lindsey's specialty; Nearly half, 23, of her career World Cup victories have come in the downhill and she is, of course, the 2010 Olympic downhill champion.

She is, moreover, the super-combined World Cup season event champion the past two seasons.

Intriguingly, Lindsey's slalom -- the second piece of the super-combined -- seems to be picking up. She finished seventh this past Sunday at the World Cup slalom stop at Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, and said Friday, after the super-combined in St. Moritz, "I am a lot more confident this year. My equipment is working really well. I feel just more sure of myself.

"A lot of times I don't have enough training in slalom. I lack confidence. You can see it in my body language when I'm skiing. Today I knew what I had to do. I knew I had to be smart, use good tactics on the pitches and let it go on the flats. I feel solid. I think it's getting better by day with my slalom results and definitely helping with my combined results as well."

Hannah Kearney: a champion's consistency

Moguls skier Hannah Kearney won Olympic gold in Vancouver two years ago. Even so, she was more nervous in her qualifying run a couple days ago at the World Cup stop in Lake Placid, N.Y., than she had been in a long, long time. For one, Hannah said, "I'd had two absolutely worst days of training, back-to-back," in some measure because of the weather. The first training day, it had been 40 degrees,  hardly conducive to snow. Then the temperature dropped to zero, with high winds that knocked out power and postponed training and turned the course into, in Hannah's words, "a skating rink."

Then there was the matter of family, and friends. Generally speaking, Hannah competes in Europe. The last time her younger brother, Denny -- with whom she's particularly close -- had seen her compete was at the December, 2009, Olympic Trials in Colorado. But he had made it to Lake Placid. So, too, had her mom, Jill, and dad, Tom, and a bunch of others.

Pressure?

As she has done at every World Cup event for the last year without a glitch, Hannah Kearney came through. She roared through qualifying, then won the event in Lake Placid, marking her 11th consecutive World Cup moguls victory -- beating the old record of Swiss star Conny Kissling.

It was the 16th individual moguls win of Hannah's career.

In a bit of serendipity, this 11th straight victory came on the same Whiteface Mountain course where the streak started on Jan. 22, 2011.

For counting purposes -- the streak does not include the 2011 world championships, where Hannah took second in the moguls and third in the dual moguls events.

It's 11 straight World Cup events, and while it perhaps may not equal one Olympic gold it is testament to extraordinary consistency.

"It's completely different," Hannah said when asked to compare Olympic gold with this streak, adding a moment later, "There's more attention and more focus at the Olympics. But skiing well over multiple seasons against good competitors is something totally different. It's just one day at the Olympics. This is my whole life."

For several months now, Hannah has been documenting her life in a series of Facebook posts -- you can find them here -- for Lovering Volvo, a family-owned Nashua, N.H., auto dealership that sponsors her. She gets an XC60 equipped with a ski rack and bike rack, a major step up from the Toyota Yaris that used to be her ride. In return, among other things, she writes a quality blog -- hardly a surprise, perhaps, for someone who goes to Dartmouth when she's not running moguls and whose brother is a Yale graduate.

In those posts, for instance, Hannah has documented the 1,174 water jumps she made in training last summer; and the 68,092 stairs she climbed, skis in hand, to make those jumps. Those totals were all more than she had ever done before -- the better to achieve consistency this winter.

Hannah has written about how Subway sandwich shops in Finland smell exactly the same there as they do back home; about how it took 33 hours and 36 minutes to travel last month from Ruka, Finland, to Meribel, France; about the excellent jam that was her reward for all that travel; about how she, a veteran of the World Cup circuit, kills time by knitting, listening to National Public Radio podcasts, doing some laundry and maybe doing some online shopping. Oh, and some skiing.

It takes a real pro to win in Finland, where there is little daylight and this season almost no snow, and then again in France, where after that long trip the snow was abundant, and then again back home in Lake Placid, after crummy training and amid awful weather and in front of mom, dad, brother and everyone else expecting you to win.

Hannah Kearney is, at this point, a pro's pro.

If everyone she knows expects her to win -- well, she expects to win. "Anything less," she said candidly, "is a failure on some level."

Winning, especially on a bumpy mountain where one slip and you careen off course, is never guaranteed. Then again, when your heart and soul are truly in what you do, the winning comes a lot easier. And the idea of pressure is a lot different. You can embrace it instead of running from it.

"I appreciate what I am getting to do with this skiing career," Hannah Kearney said. "I love what I do."

Toby Dawson's new Korean adventure

Give this to Toby Dawson: "I love," he said, "jumping into things head first." The 2006 Torino Winter Games bronze medalist in moguls skiing for the United States, adopted long ago as a toddler by a pair of American ski instructors after being abandoned on the doorstep of a police station in Pusan, in the far south of South Korea -- he's now the Korean national freestyle ski coach.

He's getting to know his real father, and step-mother, better. And his brother.

He knows now where his mother is, too. And someday, when he speaks the language much better, he will meet her.

"This is one of the biggest adventures of my life," he said on his mobile phone, the wind whistling on the mountain many time zones away over there in Korea.

The genesis of this idea came up last summer, when Toby played a key role in Pyeongchang's winning bid for the 2018 Winter Games.

At the International Olympic Committee session in Durban, South Africa, where Pyeongchang won a landslide victory, Toby told the IOC members his remarkable story -- that he was both Korean by birth and given the name Kim Bong Seok and, of course, that he was an American named Toby Dawson who was an Olympic medalist.

At 3, little Bong Seok had been abandoned on the doorstep of a police station in Pusan. He spent six months in an orphanage, where he was given yet another name -- Soo Chul. Ultimately, he was adopted by American ski instructors Mike and Deborah Dawson, who brought him to a new life in Vail, Colo.

Toby's presentation in Durban was powerful stuff -- and not just for the IOC members.

Afterward, the Korean Ski Assn. reached out to Toby and asked if he would be interested in trying to take its freestyle team to the next level.

The Koreans, excellent in ice sports, have lagged -- significantly, as all involved acknowledge -- on snow. "It sparked my interest," Toby said. "I never saw myself as a coach but it just kind of fell in my lap. And it just seemed like such a right fit."

Toby is a celebrity of sorts in Korea so the fit went both ways. Already, he has become a semi-regular presence there on TV -- which helps the association attract sponsors.

Toby's deal calls for him to be there through the Sochi 2014 Games. The reality is he's likely to be there all the way through 2018.

Toby and his biological father, Jae Soo Kim, who had first reunited in 2007, know each other now. Toby has gone even a step further perhaps with his biological brother, Hyun Chul Kim.

He calls Hyun Chul "dong-saeng," which means "little brother" in Korean. Hyun Chul calls Toby "hyeong," or "older brother." And they're using the terms affectionately.

"I have probably picked up 300 words already. I would guess in the next [few] months I'll be pretty fluent."

At which point he might be ready to meet his mother. "She is in Pusan," he said. "She is in the area where I was lost."

He said, "She contacted my father. I actually know where she is. I am waiting for the right time now … she is hesitant. She is re-married.

"I am not sure she has disclosed being married previously, having lost a child, all that stuff. She wants to keep it under wraps. I want to learn the language," he said, "and meet her one-on-one."

Field hockey: it's not for sissies

The odds were still pretty fair that Carrie Lingo might well have made the 2012 U.S. Olympic women's field hockey team. Even though her knee is so leaky that -- if you're easily grossed out don't read these next few words -- she was bending down a few weeks ago and clear liquid shot straight out and traveled, oh, three to five yards.

That, mind you, was after the seventh surgery to that same right knee. "It's a part of sports that people don't realize," she was saying a few days ago. "It's as much a part to repair to your body as it is to train. It's true."

Over 190 international matches, a career with the U.S. national team that ran for a decade and that included the 2008 Olympics, two Pan Am Games silver medals and a featured spot in the 2010 ESPN Body issue, Carrie Lingo pretty much got to do it all.

The thing is, she probably could have kept on going.

The Olympics are coming up fast. And last year, when she was maybe at 60 percent, she had nonetheless been selected for the U.S. team headed for Dublin, Ireland, and what's called the Champions Challenge, a tournament for teams ranked No. 7-14 in the world. She said, no, I'm not going to go -- take someone else.

"The biggest thing for me this last year -- I have been trying to get my body back," she said. "Obviously, the London Games are coming up. I said to myself, 'OK, Carrie, you're never going to be satisfied because you can't be [going] 100 percent anymore. The second I realized that -- I was done."

What is not well-understood by those who have only a passing familiarity with field hockey is just how physical the sport can be. Sure, the women wear skirts. "It's funny," Carrie Lingo said when asked if she'd had concussions. "I've had two big ones. I've had teeth knocked out. Broken fingers. Stitches. It's the usual, for sure. All my injuries are very common."

The sport also involves intense lateral movement and cutting. That's hard on the knees. That led to her first knee surgery, in 1998, when she was playing on the under-19 U.S. team. She tore her ACL in a practice session. They took her to the hospital ER; her knee was, as she said, "fully dislocated, everything was shifted" but there was an awful lot of attention being paid to someone else in the ER: Charlie Sheen.

This was near Los Angeles, of course.

"Ohmigosh," she said, recalling the scene. "I was sitting there and, come on -- my leg is out of place."

She recovered from that and went on to star at the University of North Carolina.

In 2003 -- surgery No. 3 -- required more work on that ACL and, as well, a micro-fracture. The doctors told her she would never play again.

Her response: "I'm like, 'Thanks for your input.' "

She came back and trained a year with the men's program.

If it sounds like Carrie Lingo is a football player -- well, that's what her parents say as well. "The surgeries have been part of the job. Oh, man," she sighed.

It's why she decided last week to remove herself from the women's national team. The knee can probably take the games. It just can't take the training anymore.

“I cannot speak highly enough of the contribution that Carrie has made to the National Team,” the U.S. women's head coach, Lee Bodimeade, said in a statement issued by the federation.

“I want to congratulate her on what she has been able to achieve as a player in our sport and wish her every success in her future endeavors. I am positive that the same strengths and attributes that she displayed when playing will ensure success.”

Added Terry Walsh, the technical director of high performance: “Carrie has been one of the cornerstones in the recent development of the USA Field Hockey program. I think her presence will forever be a part of the USA Field Hockey fabric. She has had a major impact on the mentality of the group and the hardship she has endured over the last two years has silently been an incredibly powerful driver for the whole program.”

She said, "It has been an interesting conflict within myself. Obviously, I would give anything to be able to play." That said, "I understand the cold, hard facts [it takes] to be at the Olympic Games."