Olympic Games 2010

The joke among the women of luge is that the highest non-German finisher at any race is the real winner, so strong is that team's grip on the top of the podium. Erin Hamlin is tired of being a punch line. "Yeah, it gets old," says Hamlin, 23, of Remsen, N.Y. "We improve every year, but we still have a place to look up to." With 97 consecutive World Cup wins dating back to 1997, the German hold has engendered that kind of black humor. Last year, Hamlin struck back with a gold medal at the World Championships on her home track at Lake Placid, a win that stunned the Germans, who even admitted their shock to reporters in an uncharacteristic moment of candor.

Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer is considering hiring an additional coach after a disastrous error by his current one cost him a second gold medal. Kramer said Sunday he was not planning to dump Gerard Kemkers but may add another coach to his team for the 2014 Games. Kramer won the 5,000-meter race in Vancouver. In the 10,000, Kemkers sent him into the wrong lane during a crossover deep into a race he was well on his way to winning. More miscommunication cost the Dutch team pursuit a spot in the final.

Just hours before the caldron was lighted to mark the start of these Winter Olympics, a young athlete's life was snuffed out in a horrific crash on the world's fastest luge track. On a morning training run under the first blue sky in days, Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21, of the Republic of Georgia lost control of his sled at about 80 mph as he came out of the final curve -- nicknamed Thunderbird -- and approached the finish line. He catapulted over the outer lip of the track and slammed into an unpadded roof support post.

O Canada, did it ever fill the arena, everyone singing, players with their thick arms draped around one another, fans weeping into their giant red jerseys, surely one of the loudest anthems ever. You know what? Let Canada sing. It earned it. It needed it. The joy, the relief, the redemption, and, of course, the farewell. On the final day of Canada's official duties as Olympic hosts, its national sport survived America's national grit Sunday, winning the gold-medal hockey game over the United States in overtime, 3-2, in front of a bouncing sea of braying red. The winners celebrated with the game's best ice dancing, nearly two dozen men locked in a jumping, board-rattling embrace.

It was nearly midnight Thursday, the day of triumph running into the day after, and both Kim Yuna and Brian Orser already were looking at the days ahead. The skater and her coach were in a car going from post-competition doping control to a news conference that would be aired live in South Korea, where half the country's 48 million people already had watched TV broadcasts of their national hero becoming their first Olympic figure skating champion. During the 20-minute ride, Kim and Orser could have sat back and looked at the gold medal she won three hours earlier with a performance of record-breaking, mind-boggling quality.

Shaun White slumps on a couch inside a cavernous chalet rented by one of his corporate sponsors. The millionaire snowboarder appears weary from a party thrown the previous night by another sponsor. It's Thursday afternoon and beyond the patio, on Aspen's Buttermilk Mountain, the Winter X Games have begun. White, 22, is two days from winning the popular slopestyle competition, and three days from repeating as halfpipe champion.

Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry met at a selection camp for an under-18 team -- or so Perry recalls. Getzlaf thought it wasn't until after the 2003 draft, in which the Ducks chose him 19th and Perry 28th, that they began forming the bond that led to having their names engraved on the Stanley Cup in 2007 and on Team Canada's roster for the Vancouver Olympics. After a moment's thought, Getzlaf decided Perry was right. "He made that team and I didn't," the rangy center said, "so that's why he remembers it."

Kim Yuna had boot problems. The reigning world figure skating champion took the ice for her morning practice at the Toronto Cricket Skating & Curling Club, skated a few minutes, then limped off. Kim removed her right skate and gave it to her mother, Park Mee-Hee, who had been watching from beyond a glass wall that separates the club's lounge from the rink. This unremarkable episode two months before the Winter Olympics would have been headline news in South Korea, where three TV networks had shown her arrival at a November Grand Prix event in Lake Placid, N.Y., then run endless loops of her fall on a triple loop jump in . . . practice.

It was nearing midnight when he walked into the room, a kid in a black newsboy cap and checkered scarf, all red hair and childish smile, the class clown home from the high school dance. Somebody asked Shaun White to describe his ability "in a nutshell." White immediately started moving his hands around his face in mock terror. "Oh, no!" he said. "I'm in a nutshell!" Somebody else asked him about the best parts of the Olympics. "Honestly, it's about getting our gear," he said.

Less than two months before the 2006 Olympics, Mao Asada of Japan became the first woman to land two triple-axel jumps in the same program. And Asada wasn't a two-trick pony then. She was, at age 15, the best women's figure skater in the world, winner of the 2006 Grand Prix Final, the one about whom everyone said: "Mao -- Wow!" But she had to watch the last Olympics on television. Asada had the bad luck of having been born 87 days too late to meet the International Skating Union's minimum age requirement - 15 years old by July 1 of the preceding year -- for the Winter Olympics.

In the beginning, on the morning of the opening ceremony, there was the death of an athlete pursuing his sport, a life snuffed out at age 21 in a way so awful it will forever haunt the memory of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In the end, a few hours before the Olympic flame burning here for 17 days went out Sunday night, there was an athletic moment so brilliant it also will be an everlasting memory of these Games. In between, there were organizational problems that will be forgotten, the same way they disappeared after the first few days, when the sun came out in this glimmering city and sparkled over fresh mountain snow limned against an impossibly blue sky. Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili will live forever as a symbol of what can go horribly wrong when athletes push the limits under conditions that some say were questionable, from the design of a sliding track officials already knew was both unusually fast and dangerously unforgiving, to the relative inexperience of the athlete in a sport where split-second decisions at 90 mph are required.

This ebullient, stone-washed city put on a roaring grand finale Sunday night, a sparkling celebration marked with fireworks, flames and wedding-day smiles. Were they happy here? Only in a Paris-is-liberated, hats-and-heels-in-the-air sort of way. Guess they like their hockey here. So peace out, Vancouver. Sweeter than syrup, you people. Sunday's closing ceremony was a long, over-the-top farewell for a nation of people who seem incapable of booing. Maybe they were on their best behavior for the guests, but you usually can't fake this kind of stuff.

Worldsnowboarding.com offered a comprehensive look at the quaint mountain resort of Krasnaya Polyana, Russia, with one seemingly minor disclaimer. The website said the resort's only disadvantage was its size and mild climate, "which means there is a risk to find too little snow at the lower runs even in January." Wait a minute. . . . Didn't we just go through this for the last two weeks, let alone the furious lead-up effort to redistribute snow to weather-challenged Cypress Mountain?

If nothing else, Patrick Brown will leave the Olympics with a taste for rice and kimchi. And some Korean vocabulary too. He knows the words for "left" and "right," "up" and "down." "Enough to do my job," he says. Such is the life of an itinerant bobsled coach. After guiding teams from Jamaica and Greece through past Winter Games, Brown now wears the red and blue of South Korea, whose four-man crew he has trained for several years. "I guess it doesn't matter what the nation is," the Utah man said.

Men's slalom, the last Olympic Alpine event, also provides last chances for Bode Miller and the Austrians. Miller, the sport's enigmatic icon, has already won three medals at the Vancouver Games, three more than the entire Austrian men's team. Winner of the gold in the super combined, the silver in the super-G and the bronze in the downhill, Miller was last seen last Tuesday skiing back to his condo after skiing out of the giant slalom. As for his chances in Saturday's slalom, think back to Dave Kingman's strikeout-to-home-run ratio.

On a day filled with crashes, Steve Holcomb drove his Night Train smoothly down the track and into first place at the halfway point of the four-man bobsled competition, raising hopes of ending a 62-year gold-medal drought for the United States. With two strong pushes, Holcomb twice lowered the track record, and he led Canada's Lyndon Rush by .40 of a second and Germany's Andre Lange by .44 of a second. "It's a great lead to have, obviously. It kind of takes a little pressure off. Even if we do make a little mistake . . . we still have a little padding," Holcomb said.

There always has been an austere quality about Evan Lysacek. He is tall, angular, often dressed in black, always concerned about having everything about his life in order. You see this side of him immediately upon entering his Los Angeles house, especially in the pictures that he paints for relaxation. Sasha Cohen, the 2006 Olympic figure skating silver medalist, has been Lysacek's friend for 13 years. She once spent two months as his guest while taking acting lessons near the house Lysacek was renting in Hollywood.

As soon as Steve Petrie arrived at Cypress Mountain, high above the city, a hint of panic set in. It was early January, and Petrie needed a whole lot of snow to build a halfpipe for the Vancouver Olympics snowboard competition. All he got was rain. "It rained and rained and rained," he recalled. "We were watching all the snow melt away." Which makes the last two nights semi-miraculous. After weeks of fretting -- not to mention complaints from riders -- Petrie's creation produced stirring performances in both the men's and women's finals.

By midday Thursday, reality consumed speedskater Jen Rodriguez. Relative improvement, not medals, measured success in these Olympics. In Friday's team pursuit, the U.S. women were set to face Canada, the top-ranked team in the world. "If we can get out of the first round, we may have a chance to do something good," the four-time Olympian said as she left the ice. "It's going to be extremely tough." Maybe it's only when the gung-ho platitudes subside that the unlikely occurs.

What do you do if you get kicked out of a neighborhood pickup game? Go start another one with another team. That's just about what veteran snowboarder Chris Klug did after he was dropped from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.'s program last year. He formed a team with four others. It's a do-it-yourself parallel giant slalom team. "I still wanted to continue," Klug said this week. "I had some unfinished business. It turned out to be a real blessing in disguise."